Something jumped out at me in thisEric Boehlert piece via the crack den:
Janice Crouse, senior fellow with the conservative Concerned Women for America, announced last month that O’Donnell “ought to be fired summarily for making” controversial comments about Christian fundamentalists. And Bill Gray, of the World Christian Ministries, writing online for The Conservative Voice, demanded that O’Donnell be silenced by the network: “I want no more of Rosie O’Donnell. I have sent this message to the president of ABC. … Let’s let him know that this time ABC has definitely crossed the unforgivable line — and ONLY an ABC minus Rosie will ever satisfy Christian America or a Christian world.”
ABC. They’re pissed at ABC. AB”Path to 9/11″C. Really. It illustrates quite nicely the point I’ve been making here for some time, and media observers should take note.
There is nothing you can do to make the conservative Christian right happy.
Nothing. You can run all the Clinton-hating docudramas you want. You can say fuck you to as many secretaries of state as you like in order to make nice with groups of crazy people and you can position yourselves as a bastion of family entertainment befitting the Mickey Mouse network while talking about how brave you were to stand up to criticism from those scary, scary Che-worshipping radicals like Richard Clarke.
They’ll still scream that they aren’t satisfied. It’ll take them exactly ten seconds to move on to something else that doesn’t work out for them. It’s never enough. One program isn’t enough, one show isn’t enough, one host isn’t enough. You could announce tomorrow that you were running nothing but re-runs of the 700 Club and they’d sniff that it was all a cop-out to the Democratic Party. It’s not logical, it’s not rational, it’s certainly not fair, but the worst of it? It’s not all that hard to figure out.They hate you. They hate everything you stand for, they’ve said it over and over and over again. When these people banged on their Bibles and talked about the evils of Hollywood, what, did you think they were just talking about the WB? Did you think you were okay? Did you think they were kidding? Do you get it now?
The sooner you realize that your conservative cred is only as good as the next opportunity for a fundraiser or an outraged e-mail campaign, the sooner you can stop being such cowards, crawl out from under your desks and start listening to the reality-based community again. We might not like what you do, but we tend only to insist on accuracy and balance from our media, not slavish recitation of every party line.
But if you want to keep pretending that there’s something out there you can do to endear yourselves to people who live for conflict and are eternally in search of the next target for their outrage, you go right ahead. I’ll be over here, watching cable.
A.