Thank goodness MSNBC has seen reason – they’ve dumped hateful host Michael Savage.
As so often happens in the rough-and-tumble world of live call-in TV, while the hard-working producer is fully prepared to bleep an unruly caller, he/she is not equipped to quickly bleep the host. That is why the world did get to hear Savage respond to the caller’s censored suggestion:
“So you’re one of those sodomists — are you a sodomite?”
Caller: “Yes, I am.”
Savage: “Oh, you’re one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How’s that? Why don’t you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today — go eat a sausage and choke on it. Get trichinosis.”
Later in the show, during a discussion of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating state anti-sodomy laws, the words “Supreme Court Sodomizes America” were seen on the screen, according to GLAAD, which today put out a statement saying it was “about time” MSNBC canned Savage.
“This latest attack made the clearest case for why Savage has no place on any reputable news network,” GLAAD representative Cathy Renna said in the statement. “MSNBC witnessed firsthand exactly the kind of verbal assaults GLAAD’s been warning them about for the past five months, and to their credit, they backed up their promises to hold Savage accountable.”
NBC was not without its sense of humor about Savage. On several occasions during his program, it ran one of its lame “The More You Know” public service announcements — the one in which Eric McCormack (who plays gay attorney Will Truman on the sitcom “Will & Grace”) sniffs at viewers that “hate” is a four-letter word.
Update: as is always the case, the gay basher is in turn ripped to shreds. Radar Magazine claims to have copies of letters written by Savage to beat icon Alan Ginsberg:
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.”
Now, the dope-smoking, boy-loving grand dame of ’60s degeneracy didn’t seem like the kind of riffraff a nationally renowned homophobic zealot would have on his buddy list. But we shouldn’t have been so surprised. In Savage’s thinly veiled confessional novel Vital Signs, the protagonist admits he is allured by “masculine beauty”, saying, “I choose to override my desires for men when they swell in me, waiting out the passions like a storm, below decks. More intriguing is the reported existence of a picture of Savage and Ginsberg swimming naked together in Fiji.” These days, of course, Savage is more prone to saying, “The gay and lesbian mafia wants our children!” Ah, the innocence of youth.
