Monday, March 19, 2007

* RADIO RANT: Michael Savage & Bogus History

Michael Savage has struck again with some egregious misstatements, in his commentary on the movie 300. For one thing, he at least implied that the Spartans at Thermopylae won (nope, they all perished in their "heroism"). More troubling—and in line with his usual xenophobic attitudes towards Islam—he claimed that the Xerxes & the Persians were "Muslims," although the battle took place a good millennium before the Koran.

In Savage's Manichean view of geopolitics, the Islamic world = those "backward" and "effeminate Oriental" Persians, and the Greeks = the U.S., of course (the two great "flowerings" of Western civilization). But his brief gloss-of-a-paean to Greek culture failed to mention that the Greek city-states were hardly utopias, either (most notably Sparta itslef), and that their treatment of women, slaves, and "barbarians" hardly made them diametrical opposites of that idolatrous "Orient." (And, oh, oh—the homophobe in Mr. Savage best read Plato's Symposium. . . .)

This commentary was actually from Friday, and he replayed it tonight, as he patted himself on his genius (in true Rush Limbaugh fashion). Mr.—er, Doctor—Savage actually claimed tonight, in lauding his own harangue after the replay, that "every word was perfect." Well, only if he could change the dates of either Xerxes' reign or Mohammed's birth.

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