The furor over shock jock Michael Savage’s autism rant intensified yesterday as parents of autistic kids called for his firing and at least one advertiser yanked its ads from his syndicated show.
About 40 parents and grandparents of autistic children protested yesterday outside WOR-AM (710) in New York City, one of the more than 350 radio stations - including WRKO-AM (680) - that airs his program. Another protest is planned for tomorrow at the San Francisco station where his show is broadcast.
“What he said is reprehensible,” said John Gilmore, executive director of Autism United and the father of an 8-year-old autistic boy. “We are asking for him to be fired and we want to make advertisers aware of what he is broadcasting.”
Aflac insurance pulled its ads from his show and issued a statement: “Aflac has a strong commitment to helping children through the Aflac Cancer Center and Aflac foundation. We understand that radio hosts pick on any number of targets however we found his recent comments about autistic children to be both inappropriate and insensitive.”
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view/2008_07_22_Savag...
Savage has been saying dumb stuff like this for years. Why would the sponsors leave now.
'thought-provoking', 'deep-thinking' conservative mouthpiece. He's on the air simply to push buttons and generate reactions. Even for him, though, this may be a new low.
«Savage said his severely disabled brother suffered and died in a New York “snake pit” of a “mental hospital” and he knows “first-hand what true disability is.”»
Regardless, Savage still doesn't know what Autism is. His employers will probably give him a raise for increasing their ratings. The Republic slouches onward.
... Savage's schtick is to use the Big Stick of "individual responsibility" to lay the blame for ANY problem at the feet of the poor or middle-classed individuals that are associated with the problems. Rich people get a pass, of course, since they are the class that sock puppets like Savage is hired to support.
True, Autistic children have special requirements and it behooves the parents to learn what those are. But the core problem is that such children are not socially adaptable and will always be a problem. Good parenting with a high level of education in Autism can't counter all the outbursts that come from such children. Society (yes, even fucknuts like Savage) will just have to learn to tolerate these things. After all, the environmental factors that created this rising wave of Autism is what's really to blame, and if wealth-worshippers like Savage refuse to hold the corporations accountable for the heavy-metal pollution they emitted, then he will have no choice but to deal socially with the victims thereof.
Aw come on now, these tikes just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, ala Reagan-style. Short of that, they can depend on donations from the rich or the church. Maybe another round of tax-cuts will help?
There's no need to bring every conservative into this idiot's realm.
Savage is a hatemonger. A few years ago I caught bits of his radio show on my way home from work. I was amazed at the hate and ignorance pouring out of his mouth. More amazing is the fact that there are people that actually employ him and give him a mic! Don Imus and Howard Stern got nothing on this jerk.
Michael Savage, the fag-hating radio host who thinks autism is the parents' fault, may seem like your typical blustery foaming-at-the-mouth neocon bigoted piece of shit. But Radar suggests that that's not necessarily so. I mean, yes, he's a neocon bigoted piece of shit, but one with a hippie past. Well, enough of a hippie/beatnik past to have been friends with Howl scribe and confirmed sodomite Allen Ginsberg. They wrote letters, long ago in the animal soup of time when Savage was Michael Weiner:
Dear Allen:
After speaking to you on the phone about how nice the black-white thing is in mountain villages in Fiji, I walked downstairs to the school courtyard, where a little-known black brother looks at me, takes my hand gently, we do some old-world Lower East Side finger tricks, and he peacefully kisses the back of my hand—I do the same for his hand. I told him about our brief talk, and he says, "I must have felt the vibes."
Michael Weiner
That's from 1970. Radar also mentions a rumored-about photo of Ginsberg and Savage swimming naked together in the balmy waters off of Fiji. Oh hoooooo. Were he alive today, I wonder what Ginsberg would say about this batshit zealot who was once his friend, long ago. Probably something about the best minds of his generation being destroyed by madness. I'm with you in Rockland, Allen.
lifted from http://gawker.com/5027953/michael-savages-homo-hippie-past
he's a neocon bigoted piece of shit, but one with a hippie past.
Many Neocons DO have a hippie past - look it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocon
Neocons are former liberals who changed affiliations when thier party drifted too far left for them - which explains why the libs hate them so much.
SO - in this case, unintentional as it may be, if Michael Savage DOES come from a hippee past, this might just be the first time a liberal has used the term Neocon correctly!!
Given the (ahem)..."success" of the Neocon movement, I for one, am glad they moved to the right and infiltrated the Republicrat Party.
I've never been a listener to Michael Savage for more than five minutes because he's a blithering idiot, on top of being a loudmouth.
While I often disagree with some of the other conservative hosts, like Limbaugh and occasionally Glenn Beck, they can at least claim to have an intellectual capacity more than a few pegs above "Neanderthalian."
Savage is beyond redemption, and his listeners get what they deserve.
As a parent of a child on the autism spectrum, I know that my child has always been different - not "mentally ill," not "retarded," just different. There is no medicine that will cure him, and my wife and I have worked hard to help him better fit in. He just graduated high school and will be starting college in the fall, but Savage would have you believe WE are the problem, not my son's unusual brain chemistry.
My own take on the significant rise in diagnosed cases of autism, Asperger syndrome, and related disorders: the medical profession is simply better at recognizing them than 50 years ago. Those were the days when such children with severe symptoms would have been institutionalized, and children with mild-to-moderate symptoms would have been warehoused in special ed classes, or barred from school altogether.
Yet many people in the range of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have, and always will, manage to find a niche for themselves. However, nowadays the prognosis is better, because children with autism can be linked with specialists who can help them cope with stressors and learn to improve their social interaction skills.
Of course, it's easier for a ranting moron like Michael Savage to blame the parents and accuse them of trying to milk the system for disability checks, rather than taking a few minutes to understand basic psychology.
BTW - we have never sought, nor would we think were were entitled to, disability payments for our son. On the contrary: we just want him to be successful, and the trip we made to the neurologist and other specialists only helped us better understand our son. The only "free ride" he's ever gotten was some extra time on tests, unless you count the kind teachers who tried to look out for him when kids would try to push his buttons to watch the reaction.
Besides - after all the abuse he took in the public junior high for being different, he might better qualify for combat pay than disablity pay. 7th and 8th graders can be merciless on those who are uncool, as most of us know, but for those who do things like count ceiling tiles or memorize sequential lists like American Presidents and Vice-Presidents (including their numbers and states of origin), junior high can be a nightmare.
As far as Savage's show: let the market decide. If enough advertisers figure out that it is bad business to deal with Michael Savage, stations will drop his show. Then again, it's not like Savage is the first talk show host to make medical waves; Neal Boortz got in similar hot water a while back by claiming that diagnoses of ADD and ADHD were "fraudulent." Of course, a kid with ADHD is seemingly "normal" in many other respects, so it's easier to blame the parents with such less disabling conditions, so Boortz was able to weasel out of that relatively unscathed.
And how can we forget Limbaugh accusing Michael J. Fox of "faking" his Parkinson's disease? Of course, Limbaugh focused on one patient, and did not condemn an entire population of autistic children and their families.
My suspicion is that Savage will also survive, although he is likely to lose more than a few listeners and advertisers. Bottom line: he has a solid audience of disenchanted Americans who buy into his brand of fascism masked as conservatism. I was especially surprised (and saddened) to see all the Savage Nation listeners defending his idiocy, like the morons over in Boston comenting at the above link. Here's a juicy one:
I don't agree with much of what he has to say but I do believe that Autism is the disease du jour, which I have said before I knew he said it. Other diseases du jour are: depression, ADD, ADHD, bi polar, and Yes, Autism too. I just found out that if I was a kid now they would put me on autism drugs just because I eat Skittles by color. Parents don't want to pay attention to their kids, so when it gets rough, they drug them. God bless America!
Yes, may God bless America, especially the ignorant and the misguided, like the folks who get their medical and psychlogical advice from a sniveling, cowardly radio mouth like Michael Savage.
Great post.
It is for everyone.
I wonder if Supertalk 1560 WTOD will continue to carry their internet broadcast of his show ?
Of course they will. There are enough racist, troglodyte conservatives out there to keep his ratings high. It’s all about the $$.