Opening his radio show with funeral music yesterday, Fox News host John Gibson callously mocked the death of actor Heath Ledger, calling him a “weirdo” with a “serious drug problem.”
Playing an audio clip of the iconic quote, “I wish I knew how to quit you” from Ledger’s gay romance movie Brokeback Mountain, Gibson disdainfully quipped, “Well, he found out how to quit you.” Laughing, Gibson then played another clip from Brokeback Mountain in which Ledger said, “We’re dead,” followed by his own, mocking “We’re dead” before playing the clip again.
What did Ledger do to deserve this? Is it just because he played a gay cowboy?
Gibson represents a certain mindset that you see commonly with these movement conservative, scorched earth fanatics. Their ability to empathize with another person is dependent entirely on whether that person is "one of us" or "the other side." And it takes almost nothing to make you persona non grata to these brownshirts; all Heath Ledger did was play a gay guy in a movie and develop an addiction to sleeping pills to become a "weirdo" with "a serious drug problem" whose untimely death merits only derisive laughter.
Thankfully, it's not a pan-conservative phenomenon, however. Joe Scarborough of "Morning Joe," a former Republican congressman during the Gingrich years, heard this clip, and apparently it blew his mind. He goes on and on for 5 or 10 minutes about the "stunning" inappropriateness of these comments.
And in other news, another radio care bear, Michael Savage, is quickly losing his advertisers. A campaign by Brave New Films to shame Savage's sponsors into pulling their ads from his show has gotten 4 of his 10 advertisers to drop him, and another (GEICO Insurance) is expected to follow suit. Some choice Savage-isms highlighted by Brave New Films:
"90 percent of the people on the Nobel Committee are into child pornography and molestation, according to the latest scientific studies"
Savage advocating "kill[ing] 100 million" Muslims
Savage on immigrant students' hunger strike: "[L]et them fast until they starve to death. ... Go make a bomb where you came from"
Citing more sex-change operations, increased lesbian fertility clinics, Savage said of 9-11: "That was God speaking"
On MLK Day, Savage called civil rights a "racket" designed to steal "white males' birthright"
To "save the United States," lawmakers should institute "outright ban on Muslim immigration" and on "the construction of mosques"
U.S. Senate "more vicious and more histrionic than ever, specifically because women have been injected into" it
"Jimmy Carter is like Hitler"
"Burn the Mexican Flag!"
Savage on the tsunami: "I wouldn't call it a tragedy. ... We shouldn't be spending a nickel on this"
There's something wrong with these people psychologically. They're emotionally broken. How damaged to you have to be to say these things, to laugh over and over at the death of a young, talented actor, or to advocate the indiscriminate slaughter of 100 million people? This is the kind of behavior we're used to seeing in junior high kids who lack a fully developed sense of empathy, but it's pretty stunning to see gray-haired old men display such inhumanity.
And they're spokesmen for a whole "movement."
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