I admit it.
I’m fascinated by the way Bill Moyers’ mind works.
This is not the first column I have devoted to this topic.
Moyers, if you don’t know, has a new show on PBS called “NOW With Bill Moyers.” This guy will always have a show on PBS of one kind or another. He will never have one on commercial TV. Why? Because no one would watch him. That’s not a barrier to a show on PBS, because the network is underwritten by the government and fat-cat corporations and foundations whose directors think they are donating to charity when they give to PBS.
But I digress.
I got caught up in a rambling interview he did with Tim Russert on CNBC last month.
He started by telling Russert his show would try “to bring voices to the air that don’t get heard usually. We’re trying to tell stories that others overlook, or don’t see, or don’t think as important as we do. And so we’re just trying to provide, like public television should do, an alternative to mainstream journalism.”
So what will you have to look forward to by watching Moyers show? Which unexamined subject matters will he explore?
Here are the topics that fascinate him and will dominate his brand of “alternative journalism”:
- Enron;
- George Bush’s links to big business;
- Global warming;
Does that sound like an alternative to you? Isn’t this just what we hear if we torture ourselves by listening to CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC? What’s different?
I’ll tell you what’s different about Moyers. He lets it all hang out. He is brutally honest in his partisanship, in his extremism, in his hatred of the values that made America great.
Is hatred too strong a term?
Not at all. This man is a Christian-basher – and a Jew-basher. If a Christian or Jew takes his or her religion seriously, he or she is seen as a threat to Bill Moyers. He equates such people with Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, Timothy McVeigh.
At the same time, he sees Muslims caught up in a “possibly quite hopeful inner debate.”
“Fundamentalist Muslims believe like fundamentalist Christians that the law should reflect the faith and that religious people should govern the morals of society by legislative and political control,” he explains. “Thomas Friedman of the New York Times says we’re going to have to choose between the Muslims who pray to a god of hate and Muslims who pray to a god of love. Well, that’s a choice Muslims are making, have made. I mean, the militant fundamentalist represent – what? – 10 percent, 15 percent of Islam in the same way that the extremist Christians in this country, the Christian Identity crowd, the Christian militia crowd, represent 3 percent, 4 percent, 5 percent of Christianity.”
Moyers then adds some slurs against believing Jews.
“Within all of the great Abrahamic traditions there is a violent tendency, a violent strain,” he says.
How do you deal with such nonsense, such pap, such tripe? Well, you can turn it off – which most people do, as I mentioned. Nobody takes Moyers seriously except the crowd at the Nation. But he still gets the free ride from the taxpayers and the big foundations. Ratings don’t matter to them. They want to give us our medicine – like it or not.
Here are the facts: Christians who believed very sincerely in the Bible – people who would, by today’s standards, certainly be considered by Moyers as “fundamentalists” – founded this nation, fought for its independence, wrote the greatest constitution ever devised by men and set the wheels in motion for true self-government for the first time in history.
They drew their inspiration largely from the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. Some of them even wanted Hebrew to be the official language of the new nation. Most of them – from Washington to Adams to Madison – clearly believed in a quite literal interpretation of the Bible.
Were they haters? Were they Christian militia? Were they Christian Identity followers?
No, but they were revolutionaries. And, if they had any notion of the way their vision of freedom had been perverted to coerce citizens to subsidize Bill Moyers’ style of propaganda, they would undoubtedly be spinning in their hallowed graves.
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