"Socialized" medicine: Next front in the right's "-isms" arms raceby Karl Frisch
An "-isms" arms race is under way in America.
Turn on cable news or talk radio and you're likely to hear a conservative host, right-wing pundit, or Republican elected official accuse President Obama and the Democratic Congress of just about every "-ism" in the book.
Socialism, Marxism, Leninism, fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism -- few, if any, "-isms" have been spared as the right escalates its daily verbal assault on the progressive agenda.
In fact, according to a search of broadcasts on TVEyes.com, since Obama's inauguration in January, these terms and others like them have been thrown around on cable news at least 3,000 times. Add conservative talk radio and the nation's newspaper op-ed pages to the mix and watch that figure grow like a well-watered, limited edition Bill O'Reilly Chia Pet.
Take the third most-listened-to radio voice in America, San Francisco's Michael Savage, who recently called Obama "a neo-Marxist fascist dictator in the making." That's one of the kinder things Savage has said of the president during his daily three-hour hatefest. He's also claimed that the "radical left," including Obama, "dreams" of "Maoist revolution" with "death camps" and that Obama appointees "actually have almost the same exact policies as the Nazi Party did." ........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200904020010