"Siege Heil" & Medved interview

Funny how little has changed in 40 years:

"In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society.  Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around.  You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there.  We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line.  We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work.  But this isn't the test.  The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here the process is more subtle, but the end results are the same.  I've learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in.  The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the State and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act.  I've always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government's basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make.  But I've come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office.  Huey Long once said, 'Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.'  I'm afraid, based on my own long experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."   ---- Jim Garrison, 1967

The best way to debate Medved is to point out the logical fallacies and cheap debating techniques he regularly employs AS HE USES THEM, e.g., begging the question, appeal to authority, strawman, forcing yes/no answers, etc.  Most of his audience is quite ignorant of what he's doing and taken in.  He's good at it, but he relies heavily upon the fact that the majority of his audience is unfamiliar with these tried and true tactics.  Add to this the incessant interrupting, outright lying, and the fact that on talk radio the host is not only one side of the debate but also the moderator, and you have a no-win proposition for the guest and callers.  Wasserman did well under these circumstances.  I heard Medved in a REAL debate over Iraq out here in Seattle.  He got thoroughly trounced. ----     W. Stewart