Michael Medved: The Most Dangerous Nobody on Talk Radio

Jeff Koopersmith takes Michael Medved to the woodshed.

July 18, 2008 – Geneva (apj.us) – It's been years since I've thought about the failed film-critic turned-infantile-political-jargonaut Michael Medved. 

I thought Medved had finally been booted from his last radio gig and would retire to some think tank in Venice Beach, California to contemplate his navel through the eyes of a war mongering bigot – which he is. 

This week, Medved popped on my radar once more. He wrote a disgraceful column about Barack Obama titled "The Candidate as Cult Leader".  Medved’s name came up in a Google search because I knew that Karl Rove has started this "program" within the McCain campaign in which the words “Cult” and “Obama” are to be used in the same breath as often as possible.  

There are already more than three thousand separate references to "Obama" and "Cult" on search engines, which tells us that Rove and McCain are doing a good job of making Obama the "Black” Jim Jones, the psycho who fed his throng poison Kool-Aid decades ago.

It's no mistake that Medved, a true pseudointellectual twerp who managed to squeak through Yale as did George Bush Jr., used the word "cult" repeatedly in his thuggish column.  He was ordered to do this by his keepers – the ultra right freakmongers who give us the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rove, to mention just a few.

Why use the word "cult" against Senator Obama?  Well, consider this: look at what that word brings to mind – weird religious sects, rage, furore, fad, craze, devil worship, passion, madness, and the like.

Cult, my friends, is an extremely loaded word with not a single positive meaning.  Ergo:  Barack Obama has caused a cult to surround him. Cults are bad – Obama is bad.

Moreover, what do cults do?  Well, they are often violent, led by insane people, formed by angry preachy types and worse, they form "covens", they burn and torture animals, they act as a storm scarring our civilization.

Ergo, Barack Obama might be violent insane, ready to – in the name of "his" God – destroy us.

Medved, who must get all his cues from Rove, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, opens his ridiculous pap telling us that Obama supporters are substituting his middle name for theirs – which conveniently for the racist Medved is "Hussein." Oh. My!! GOD!!! – a Muslim name!  

Medved perverted this news from an otherwise interesting article originally written by Jodi Kantor of the New York Times which quickly put an end to any thought that this name-changing was a phenomenon racing across the great plains.

To idiots like Medved and about half the country who sees themselves as "deep thinkers" and "worthy of the vote" – this name-changing is a cry for war – against Obama and everyone who follows him.

It makes no difference that only a handful of people are loony or silly enough to change their middle names to Hussein yet Medved does not mention this.  

Medved, little Gestapo sort that he is, then draws a crooked line between his stupidity and to the scarier cults telling us that he really isn't surprised because "One of the key elements in many religious cults involves a name change – like transitioning from Richard Alpert to Baba Ram Dass, or from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X.”  

He goes on, “To Obama’s true-believers, adding an Islamic middle name is a small price to pay for connecting with a candidate who qualifies as a “lightworker” and “an enlightened being”, according to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Medford.  

Medved uses Baba Ram because of his interest in psychedelic drugs and friendship with Timothy Leary and mentions Malcolm X – well I guess you know why.  He does not bother to explain that many Muslims at that time would add the X to their names from religious reasons and that Malcolm Little is a an important historical figure – both to white and black America.

Next, the little weasel Medved attempts feebly to get you to believe that Obama is a "lightworker" – "capable of relating to and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment”.

Medved, villain that he is, uses Garn Thomas' biography of the Senator, to underscore this absurdity quoting Thomas – “There has emerged a new leader who seems to be granting Americans a renewed license to dream.  Barack Obama has proven repeatedly that he can touch people from all genders”, (not just both of them, you’ll note, but all of ‘em), “political affiliations, and across racial divides."
 
Take note of Medved's vicious homophobic wisecrack about gays and lesbians?  This is a key to understanding what the man is – an insipid pig.

Medved goes after Obama again, this time trying to draw a link between the senator and the not all together Boy George (who I find amusing and entertaining) because Boy George wrote a song about Obama called Yes We Can/Make it to the Promised Land,” and then Medved adds his little girl scout knife:  "…but Boy George himself couldn’t quit make it to the promised land of the United States due to visa problems regarding his history of drug busts."

Medved labels Obama – "The Hope Pope" and claims he, Medved, was embarrassed by those profoundly impressed by meeting and talking with Barack Obama.  Naturally, he would be embarrassed to read of someone's real admiration for another, Medved himself has never, if the world has any intelligence at all, been admired by anyone save perhaps a Klan member.

He says left handedly that only stupid and irresponsible people would fall for Obama's "mass hysteria" and claims that the senator's only real accomplishment in 47 years of life "has been to build up the mass hysteria and messianic expectations surrounding this campaign.

He compares Obama to the Beatles.  Of course, Medved was not impressed by the Beatles, but he spends more words bemoaning the fact that girls went wild over them – and not Medved of course.  

He adds, tastefully, that the girls were "wetting themselves" over the Beatles and that he is disgusted by what he calls "an orgy of adulation”.

Now please read this and tell me that Medved is not a pitiable fool:  "It’s the phenomenon itself, the crazed delirium of the Oba-maniacs, that compels attention, even fascination….So, too, the messianic yearnings and wild-eyed, zombie-like devotion of Obama’s unhinged followers comes across as far more exciting and significant than the surprisingly pedestrian and platitudinous substance of his actual campaign."

Is this man insane?
 
Medved has a preposterous talk show on religious radio you might want to listen to for chuckle.  He has written 10 non-fiction books – all of which are in fact adolescent fiction and seem to come from some absurd understanding of life, politics, and the world around him – or is it that he's just another whore for the ultra right?

Medved and his breed of hate mongers deserve their own constitutional amendment denying their right to express themselves.  He is nothing more or less than a grimy bigot and I am ashamed that my fellow man would bother to tune him in.

So don’t.  And that’s an order!

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Jeff Koopersmith is an internationally renowned political consultant, opinion research authority and policy analyst. He has lobbied for causes including the alternative fuel sector and women's health, and is an expert on the international real estate market. He lives in Philadelphia, Washington and Geneva.