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Air America Bankrupt & Cindy Sheehan Nobel Prize: Delusions of success and grandeur

Steve Yuhas

In reporting the much anticipated and much predicted bankruptcy of Air America, the liberal talk network that failed to gain traction in even the most liberal of locations, the New York Times wrote that the network began broadcasting some two years ago to “much fanfare.” What the Times leaves out is that the fanfare for the network that was supposed to mark the beginning of the end to the hold that conservative talk has over the airwaves is that the fanfare came from the Times and other left leaning newspapers that filed story after story about the need and market for such a network.

It is probably safe to assume that even at Air America there is no serious attempt to paint a picture that liberal talk radio is still alive. Then again, liberals are not people who see reality so they may actually look at bankruptcy the way they look at failure – a virtue.

Al Franken is said to be owed around $300,000 and the total debt for the company is around $20 million; this after losing over $40 million since the lights went on at the most liberal and unentertaining network in the world.

So what was it about Air America that caused it to go from the shining star of the left – a media darling touted in more stories in major newspapers than sales from Ann Coulter’s myriad of best selling books to the bankrupt irrelevancy it is today?

Very simply put is that Air America personalities all sound alike and even though they hired comics and people that the left finds interesting to draw in the advertisers and donors, nobody wants to listen to a bunch of people complain, yell and create conspiracy theories about everything from September 11th being a product of a collaborative effort by President Bush and a rehash of the Clinton impeachment.

Radio has to be informative as well as entertaining and there is just no entertainment in listening to Al Franken or Janeane Garofalo complaining and about liberals losing elections and that everyone in America is stupid except people living in San Francisco.

Air America had the best of both worlds when it first launched. Thousands of stories printed about the new network that would take traditional talk radio to task for being too conservative, hundreds of in depth reporting on television and a cadre of Howard Deaniacs lining up to pay money to listen to the same drivel as could be heard by any member of Congress or loony leftist willing to camp at the end of President Bush’s driveway in the summer heat.

Still – nobody was listening and now the network is filing for protection from creditors. Isn’t there something ironic about a network that talks about the evils of our government and the need for the rich to have their wealth confiscated and redistributed to the poor now calling on the same government to bail them out of the financial mess they dug themselves into?

All the while the darling of Air America (they have a few, but nobody can beat Cindy Sheehan) announced at a book signing that she is a finalist for a Nobel Peace Prize. Interesting and totally appropriate considering that Sheehan falls into the same mindset as that of Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat so it is quite likely that if anyone is up for the Peace Prize – Sheehan must be it.

In Sheehan’s favor for winning the Norwegian prize is that the bar for winning it has been set very low.

The bar was set lowest when Yasser Arafat won the Peace Prize after declaring that every Jew should die in Arabic while saying in English that Jews are great. Jimmy Carter won for shaping the deal that allowed North Korea to get billions of dollars in aid and technology from the United States and before the ink was dry (and Carter back picking peanuts) the North Koreans were cheating on the deal and making plans to create their nuclear weapon.

Sheehan will be in good company if she is indeed up for the prize and ultimately wins it, but one has to wonder exactly what she did to deserve it. Camping is a noble endeavor, but surely the Nobel committee could have found a Boy Scout or a person who actually did something who camped for peace instead of someone who camped as part of an almost macabre grieving process that included wishes for time travel in order to kill the President of the United States as he slept when he was an infant.

On the other hand there are a lot of dictators that the Nobel committee has not yet recognized and a whole lot of anti-Semites who are far more worthy of a prize than Sheehan. Sheehan merely talked about peace and time travel to kill Republican infants; there are people who would actually win the prize if Air America handed it out and the network would find those despots even more deserving.

How about a prize by what Sheehan calls freedom fighters in Iraq or a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? If the Norwegians are in a particularly giving mood perhaps they could give the prize to Uday and Qusay Hussein in death as well or just go all out and hand one over to Saddam Hussein. Invite the one eyed mullah from Afghanistan and ask Osama bin Laden to announce the winners – it will be exactly like Oscar announcement morning.

Air America failed because nobody listened and now Sheehan is announcing her own candidacy to the Nobel circle of peace. Camp Casey will never be the same again if Sheehan gets herself a gold medal because when someone becomes a Nobel Laureate certain things are expected of them (showering and changing clothes for a start) and Sheehan just doesn’t have it in her.

Sheehan and Air America are once again fodder for the terrible, evil and completely irrelevant conservative talk radio; meanwhile not a single conservative talker was forced to bankruptcy court today.

I wonder why it is that conservatives on the radio seem to do well and liberals continue to fall on their collective faces. It could be that socialism is just not as popular as the folks behind Air America or the New York Times thought it was or it could be a very simple reason.

Nobody listened because the fanfare that happened at the beginning of Air America was little more than fanfare created by a media as out of touch with the people as Cindy Sheehan is with her own family.

Of course – after coming out of bankruptcy Air America may end up just fine and get back the money they lost over the years and Sheehan could ultimately be a Nobel Laureate, but all that will prove is what conservatives have been saying on the radio every day for decades: that the far left is made up of people who run the mainstream media and get messages from time travel. Now all that has to be added into the far left are the folks at Nobel Peace Prize headquarters – the Publisher’s Clearing House for dictators, despots, terrorists and the Twilight Zone.
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