Walnuts vs RW Radio

In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the Dem nomination largely because his military service as a decorated Vietnam vet made him appear to be the most electable candidate. Then a rightwing group calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth started a smear campaign alleging that Kerry hadn't really earned his decorations, and generally trying to discredit his military record.

The Swift Boat Vets became the focal point of the RW media (talk radio and Fox News), who kept their allegations front-and-center for hours every day, day after day, for weeks. Kerry ended up losing Ohio by 120,000 votes and New Mexico by about 6000. If he had switched those two states, he'd have won in the Electoral College, 276-261, and we'd have been spared four years of Willy Wanker's bullshit.

We'll never know if the Swift Boat Vets cost Kerry the election, but we do know that thanks to talk radio, "swiftboating" became part of the country's political lexicon.

The next time talk radio got to flex its muscles was in October 2005, when W nominated Harriet Miers to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. They stirred up enough shit among W's "base" voters that he was forced to back off the nomination, and RW radio was beginning to get the idea they could dictate the direction of politics in the USA.

In 2006, talk radio opposition helped to kill the Dubai Ports World deal. But the crowning achievement was in summer 2007, when they provoked enough angst among the GOP base to get the Senate immigration reform bill defeated, and put illegal immigation on the table as this year's big wedge issue. Without their wedge issues, the Republicans got nothing.

Call me crazy, but I don't like the idea of talk radio hosts thinking they can control the political agenda by whipping a minority of mindless conservative idiots into a frenzy. That's why I'm curious to see if Walnuts can weather the current storm and collect enough conservative votes to win the nomination. If he can, maybe it'll send a message to the folks behind the radio microphones that all they are is background noise.