Oh really?
Michael Weiner, who egomaniacally calls himself “the Savage Nation”, devotes nearly thirteen whole minutes of his gross abuse of the public airwaves to, you guessed it, celebrating the diagnosed brain cancer of Senator Ted Kennedy:
Transcript of his incoherent ramblings at Media Matters.
There’s so much wrong with this man that it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s make a valiant effort here…
The poor guy’s been suffering for years, you know? Unfairly he’s been accused of alcoholism, but we see now that it was something much more deep-seated.
Uh oh. I see someone doesn’t understand how malignant glioma of the parietal lobe operates. It’s not “something much more deep-seated” that causes “suffering for years” and gets one “unfairly accused of alcoholism”. Glioma is a fast-moving cancer. Most of those who are diagnosed with it are dead in less than a year. By definition, it can’t cause “suffering for years”, let alone anything resembling alcoholism or insanity. Until the victim presents with seizures, as Kennedy did, the condition is entirely without symptoms. Which is what makes malignant glioma so devastating. By the time the victim presents with symptoms, it’s already too late to hope for a cure, and treatment tends to be about control or palliation instead.
The Wiener Nation repeatedly plays a Dead Kennedys song while jabbering and vomiting at the same time. Classy. He even treats us to the lyrics and his own highly idiosyncratic interpretation of “California Über Alles”, fixating on the line “I am not a liberal”. Will someone kindly inform him that the Dead Kennedys are a leftist group, and when they say they’re not liberal, they only mean that liberals are too watered-down for their liking–and not that they themselves are with the far-right, as the Wiener and his jackboot-licking caller obviously think they are?
But then again, this mistake is kind of predictable. The homophobic Wiener used to hang out with the very gay Allen Ginsberg in his youth, and he’s doing his damnedest to make sure everyone forgets it, even if he can’t. So it’s just like him to twist a cultural reference until it’s even more bent-out-of-shape than he is. (And baby, that takes some doing!)
Onwards:
Later in the program, Savage aired a clip of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) offering a tribute to Kennedy on the Senate floor before describing Byrd as “a senile senator” and “a walking psycho.” Savage went on to assert, “For years now, Byrd has been blubbering on the floor of the Senate. For years, I mean, to be honest, Kennedy didn’t seem sane to me.” He continued, “Forget about the drunk stories and all that — anybody can drink. The guy sounded like he was off for years, I’m sorry.”
Sorry? No, he’s not. Weiner, or Wiener, is not sorry in the least. He’s glad, because he thinks Ted Kennedy’s diagnosis suddenly vindicates his own long-held beliefs about liberal senators of a certain age, which he then extrapolates to liberals in general:
This is running America. No wonder Ahmadinejad’s racing ahead with a nuclear weapon. He’s afraid of these old men? He’s afraid of these men who don’t know what they’re talking about? They don’t know what they’re talking about. No wonder Al Gore can receive a prize — a Nobel Prize for something that doesn’t exist. No wonder. Nobody knows what’s going on. Either they’re senile, or they’re bought out, or they’re corrupt, or they’re crazy, or they’re on medication. And we the people are sitting here saying, “The king has no clothes,” and the king says, “Off with your head.”
Perceptive reader, please note that the Wiener also extrapolates his own grotesquely twisted, much-in-the-minority view to the point where he, a Nation of One, becomes “We the People”. Megalomania much?
What’s interesting to note, as an aside, is how Michael Weiner–presumably Jewish–has far less hate for fascism than he reserves for its victims:
In February, discussing the death of Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), the only member of Congress to have survived the Holocaust, Savage stated, “You’re not supposed to talk badly about the dead. I generally wouldn’t do it. But in the case of Tom Lantos, I’ll make an exception. I think he was one of the most — he was a scoundrel. And I’ll tell you why I detested Tom Lantos. The man survived the Holocaust of World War II and used it as a weapon the rest of his life.”
Interesting, that. I’m no fan of Lantos either–he was a warhawk when he should have been a war-resister, he rubber-stamped the Hatriot Act, and his idea of what constituted a dictator extended too far into the realms of democracy for my liking. But at least I respect his status as a holocaust survivor and his right to speak out against fascism using, yes, that status as a weapon. Even if I don’t go so far as to approve his using it as a justification for a corporatist war.
The Wiener, however, hated Lantos because there was a D after his name–and because Lantos was a bona-fide holocaust survivor while he, Michael Weiner, had not survived bugger-all and therefore had no bragging rights. So what happens? Weiner throws in with the Nazis instead, thus neatly demonstrating how monstrous egos make monsters of those who can’t get over themselves.
But perhaps I should give this ugly old whiner the benefit of the doubt. After all, he’s of a certain age too, and I’ll bet he’s been sick a lot longer than the unlucky Sen. Kennedy has:
Long before he became Michael Savage, the radio honcho was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens as Michael Alan Weiner, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father, Ben, whom those who knew him describe as gruff and profane — and who died of a heart attack in his fifties — was a socially conservative street vendor who worked his way up to owning a small antiques store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
“Benny had a chip on his shoulder and was always mad at the world, and he was tough on Michael. There was nothing Michael could ever do to please him,” recalls Alan Zaitz, who has known Weiner since the two of them were in Hebrew school together as second-graders.
Benny Weiner verbally abused his son and didn’t hesitate to embarrass him in front of his teenage friends, Zaitz says: “Michael would have on tight black jeans and a boat-necked sweater and his dad would say, ‘I don’t like the way you’re dressed. You look like a fag,’ stuff like that.”
Is there a clinical name for a condition that causes an abused kid to turn into his own abusive father after a certain age? If there is, he’s got it. A most peculiar psychopathy indeed, and one that can’t be ascribed to glioma of the parietal lobe, although I don’t doubt that it is highly malignant.
