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RUSH: Have any of you heard of an individual by the name of LZ Granderson? Snerdley? He has not heard of LZ Granderson. Dawn, have you? Brian, have you heard of LZ Granderson? Prior to last night I had not heard of LZ Granderson. However, LZ Granderson was named the Journalist of the Year by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender crowd. He has a column at CNN.com, and he also writes for ESPN. LZ Granderson named the Journalist of the Year. In an op-ed posted at CNN.com yesterday, LZ Granderson, talking about Operation Fast and Furious, said times have changed and not everything is our business anymore. We just need to butt out of this.

As for the people killed because of the operation, they’re collateral damage. The Journalist of the Year as named by the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, said of Operation Fast and Furious, it’s none of our business. Times have changed. We need to butt out. The people killed in this operation are collateral damage. Journalist of the year.

This is an excerpt from the piece. “We are a nosy country. Though to be fair, it’s not entirely our fault. Between the 24/7 news cycle, social media and reality TV, we have been spoon fed other people’s private business for so long we now assume it’s a given to know everything. And if there are people who choose not to disclose, they must be hiding something. Being told that something’s ‘none of your business’ is slowly being characterized as rude, and if such a statement is coming from the government, it seems incriminating. Times have changed. Yet, not everything is our business. And in the political arena, there are things that should be and need to be kept quiet. … Heads should roll because of the Fast and Furious debacle. We don’t need every detail of that operation to be made public in order for that to happen.” But we don’t need to be told.

You agree with some of this sentiment as expressed here by LZ Granderson? Well, he could be your new hero, then. I’ll get you a subscription to his column on CNN. I’ll pay for it if this guy’s lighting you up in there. Speaking of that, there was a column, our old buddy David Brooks of the New York Times, who wrote once of Obama that the crease in his pants was such that that alone told Brooks he’s gonna be president and was gonna be a good one. The crease in his pants. David Brooks, in the New York Times, wrote a piece yesterday, said that we have to relearn the art of following our leaders. We don’t have a leadership problem in the United States. We’re not good followers anymore.

“I donÂ’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans donÂ’t trust their institutions,” and it’s not the institutions’ fault, it’s Americans’ fault. “We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power. … Then there is our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect. … But the main problem is our inability to think properly about how power should be used to bind and build. … Those ‘Question Authority’ bumper stickers no longer symbolize an attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority. They symbolize an attitude of opposing authority.” And this is not good.

So we got LZ Granderson, Journalist of the Year, we don’t need to know, it’s none of our business. Whatever Obama did, it’s cool, and if there was death, it’s collateral damage. And then Brooks, in his own way, is saying, we’re not following well. We just need to accept what our leaders tell us and learn to love it. Now, in Brooks’ case, where this comes from is the belief that he and others like him are members of an elite and they’re smarter and brighter and better, and they’re doing fine. It’s us who are the problem. We don’t recognize how smart these people are. We don’t acknowledge their elite status. We don’t trust their intelligence and their brains. And America is in trouble because we are not following the smart people. We’re renegades, we are independent, and we don’t trust the institutions that are populated today by the best and brightest.

Brooks even criticizes our fervent devotion to equality. He says, “ItÂ’s hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.” If we’re gonna assume that we’re all equal, then we’re not gonna recognize the smartest people among us. And we’re not gonna follow them. Now, if you take some of this stuff out of context, he’s right. If you combine it with his theme, it’s crazy. For example, when he says, “ItÂ’s hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves,” if we’re all gonna be fervently devoted to equality. Well, you take that just by itself, you could make a case that it makes sense. But when you combine it with his theme that most of us are a bunch of worthless nobodies who think we’re somebody’s and don’t recognize the brilliance of people like Friedman and Brooks and Obama and the rest, it’s no wonder the leaders can’t do their jobs because all the followers think they’re smarter than the leaders, when they’re stupid.

So his basic point is, folks, we’re not subservient enough. Simply not subservient enough. So LZ Granderson, who I just learned that Snerdley admires — (laughing) Brooks fears the consequences of a skepticism about authority. This whole piece, he says, people who are skeptical of authority will lead to dangerous consequences, such as you end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties that try to dispense with authority together, altogether. They reject hierarchies and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world should be like the Internet, a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and every individual is king. So the Tea Parties, Occupy Wall Street are the same because they’re trying to dispense with authority altogether. And of course it’s written from the standpoint that Brooks is a member of the authority, he is an authority, and he’s being rejected. He doesn’t like it, and the problem is not that he’s not persuasive enough; the problem is that we simply don’t know how to follow.

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