LIBERADIO(!)

Choices. Southern Beale is laser-focused on them. From the choices an unhappy liberal had during the Bush administration (“at least they offered to leave the country [and go to Canada]; they weren’t threatening to take a huge chunk of real estate with them…”), to the choice Sarah Palin made during her last pregnancy (“Palin has grabbed headlines and warmed right-to-lifers hearts on sharing her story about being ‘tempted’ to ‘make it all go away”), and finally, the choice the Malkins and Valentines of this world have to either speak truth or manufacture their own reality (“The predictable right-wing pearl clutching over a Dept. Of Homeland Security report about extremist groups has put my bullshit meter into overdrive. The fact that the report was initially requested by the Bush Administration, although the Malkintents refer to it as the “Obama report,” was my first clue.)

While SoBe’s posts all have choices in common, the choices themselves all have consequences in common. And while you would think that liberals would be responsible for their choices (move to Canada…or not) and conservatives responsible for theirs (present lies as truth…or not), it turns out that liberals are responsible for them all!

And because we are the responsible ones, we know to watch how we present our ideas or risk ending up like Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano, who for some reason decided to apologize for a perfectly legitimate report on domestic terror possibilities. We know, before the crowing even starts, that there will be crowing about a smiling President vigorously shaking hands with a favorite South American target of the right wing echo chamber and we search frantically for an explanation. We know it’s necessary to stay one step ahead of a news cycle – even before you have digested the full nuance of a story, picture, or report – because the seeds of doubt and suspicion, minus any kernel of truth, have already been planted by a pernicious group of broadcasters, pundits, and politicians.

We know that if a Democratic governor of a southern state – all puffed up by a crowd of his most rabid supporters – had even jokingly gone there on secession during the Bush administration, shouts of “treason!” would have echoed wildly, as SoBe puts it, because “Drudge, Malkin, Reynolds et. al. get in high dudgeon…[and] Rush and the Fox-heads flog it mercilessly.” (And don’t forget the mainstream media’s part, as they struggle to maintain their impartiality while asking, “Governor So-and-so, is he really threatening to overthrow the government? Some say yes!”

This morning we asked Jeff Teague, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Middle and East Tennessee, if any of the organization’s detractors can see the irony in being anti-choice as well as anti-contraception & anti-sex ed? Twenty percent of Tennesseans don’t, he said, and you just learn to leave those 20% alone. But when those twenty percent are being whipped into a hate-filled secessionist frenzy by statements like, “Barack Obama already made it clear that if one of his girls got pregnant he’d deliver them to the abortion clinic himself,” are they really so easy to ignore?