Re: Dixie Chicks Victims of a Republican Plot

Date: 19 May 2003 12:46:01 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.radio.talk
Size: 2,369 bytes

>From: email-address-deleted
>Last year, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks contemptuously dismissed Toby
>Keith's popular pro-war song "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue," saying
>it
>was "ignorant and it makes country music sound ignorant." No boycott was
>called. In fact, not a word was said.
>So there's no reason to interpret the hostile response that followed Maines's
>anti-war comments as the spontaneous reaction of an outraged country
>audience.
>In fact, the attack on the Dixie Chicks was a political maneuver no less
>calculated than the Watergate break-in.
>According to a story from americannewsreel.com sent to RRC by former Reprise
>president Howie Klein, "Phone calls originating from Republican Party
>headquarters in Washington went out to country stations, urging them to
>remove
>the Chicks from their playlists.The 'alternative concert' [to the Dixie
>Chicks'
>tour opener] is actually the work of the South Carolina Republican Party and
>party officials are helping promote the concert.
What this article fails to mention is that
Natalie's words about Toby Keith's song are documented in perpetuity for all to
hear and to see at the end of Track 6 on their best-selling concert DVD, after
which they follow up with a patriotic song of their own.
Her comment on that song can in no way be compared to her remarks in London at
a time when this nation was in the process of putting together a coalition
prior to the war in Iraq.
Taking issue with a country song and verbally attacking the President when on
foreign soil by saying "I am ashamed that my President is from Texas" are two
entirely different things.
I am a big Dixie Chicks fan but I could not listen to their music for about a
month after she made that statement in London.
No Republican operative called me and I don't listen to a country music station
here in NY because we don't have one.
The reaction of the free-market, music buying public was what accounted for
the decline in sales of their music. It came out of personal feelings, not out
of a concerted effort by All the President's Men.
I don't doubt that the Bush-bashing radical opposition could not hear the
difference between a comment about a song and a direct attack on the President.
The American public has never been able to develop such thick calluses so as
not to be able to discern the difference.