Talk show host Michale Savage with John McSame during happier times
“…[I]t’s a fraud, its a racket…I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is.” – Michael Savage, 7/16/08
Nationally syndicated right wing radio talk show host and hate monger Michael Savage (real name “Michael Alan Weiner“), has had a rough couple of weeks. Basically, he hit the trifecta.
Not only was his radio show dumped from at least nine stations for his diatribe against autistic children, Newsday reports that he lost major advertisers like Sears, Aflac, DirectBuy, and Radio Shack, and yesterday a federal district judge threw out his copyright lawsuit against CAIR for daring to use his own words against him. (For background on same, see Jonathan Turley here.)
Media Matters posted the transcript of the show, which continues from the quote above as follows:
“What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’ ” Savage concluded, “[I]f I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, ‘Don’t behave like a fool.’ The worst thing he said — ‘Don’t behave like a fool. Don’t be anybody’s dummy. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t cry.’ That’s what I was raised with. That’s what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You’re turning your son into a girl, and you’re turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That’s why we have the politicians we have.“
Re: the advertisers’ revolt, Newsday reports that:
During a press conference in Manhattan on Friday, John Gillmore and Evelyn Ain of Autism United and State Sen. Craig Johnson (D-Port Washington) applauded the “necessary” steps taken by the advertisers and radio stations.
“The companies who have spoken with their advertising dollars are exercising their free speech,” Johnson said. “What Michael Savage has done and has said borders, simply, on hate speech.”
Savage/Weiner was also fired by MSNBC in 2003 for screaming at caller to his show:
Oh, so you’re one of those sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig; how’s that?”
What’s next? His fellow hate monger Bill O’Reilly equating Daily Kos with the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis? We can only hope things don’t go that far.
