Book Review! The Enemy Within by Michael Savage!

Michael Savage is something else. Not only as he gathered a gigantic following Estimated at around 8 million listeners) he’s also managed to get banned (banned by then U.K home Secretary Jacqui Smith in 2009) from entering a western nation entirely based on his political beliefs. I’ve been reading one of his books from 2003, The Enemy Within, which I found at a local mall.



I can see Michael Savage being semi-controversial but I don’t think he should be banned in the United Kingdom. The right wing talk show host does refer to homosexuality as “sodomy” in The Enemy Within. He was fired from MSNBC in 2003 for saying to a caller- "Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig." Michael Savage wrote about this very incident in The Enemy Within, his claim was the caller was a crank caller, and that he didn’t know the microphone was on, and that he issued an immediate apology. The rapper 50 Cent and others are the subject of similar controversies, but did not get banned from entering the U.K. Michael doesn’t, however, advocate gay bashing crimes. I haven’t seen him advocate any illegal acts of violence. The only time I’ve heard him using ethnic slurs is one time he referred to his Irish-American rival conservative pundit Sean Hannity as “corn-beef eating”. He is strongly against illegal immigration but he says he has no problem with legal immigration into the United States. The distinction between someone like Michael Savage and a 50 cent lies in that Michael Savage criticizes things like socialized health care and wealth redistribution, which could very well be the real reason Michael Savage is banned from entering the U.K. and not 50 Cent. That’s why I, a libertarian conservative, find the whole thing with Michael Savage and the United Kingdom is totally absurd. The MIAC documents from the same year (2009) was much more serious in my mind. For those who don’t know what that was, there was a document going around Missouri law enforcement identifying people with bumper stickers supporting the presidential campaigns of Ron Paul, Bob Barr on the Libertarian ticket, and Chuck Baldwin on the small, third party Christian right Constitution Party as potentially dangerous militia movement members. I could have been in deep trouble on that I am a big supporter of both Ron Paul and Bob Barr. So I don’t support the ban on Michael Savage entering Great Britain, that’s a very slippery line.
At the same time, my identifying myself as libertarian conservative and a Ron Paul supporter indicates exactly what I think of his book: which is to say, I agreed with some of it but didn’t like it that much. If you look back at the 2008 election season, Ron Paul and Bob Barr didn’t run on a strongly anti-gay or anti-Muslim agenda. Michael Savage is fairly predictable. I find his writing sort of dull, really. I was back at the same local Pennsylvania Barnes and Nobel, I found they had the audio books section, which was a few feet from the horror DVD section, the horror DVD section had numerous films I wanted to see. The audio book section had a number of conservative materials I’m more interested in then Michael Savage- again, Ron Paul, and other things like Stieg Larsson’s work on audio format. Those are all things I deem more enjoyable then Michael Savage. I’m not going to finish that book most likely, to be totally honest. Every once and a while, he did bring up a few interesting points in The Enemy Within. He writes about the ACLUs support of NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, which I didn’t know anything about. He’s very into going into these tangents about growing up in the Lower East Side. I wasn’t blown away by any of that material. Michael Savage is kind of funny sometimes, he brings up a valid point every once and awhile. His genius is provocation. Its very hard to shock anyone in this day and age, let alone get banned from entering a western nation based on something you said. Michael Savage did accomplish that, I’ll give him that much.
You know what though? Since the horror film Human Centipede 2 was just also just banned in the United Kingdom (for sexualized violence) you know what would be a great first date? What would be great on a first date is to take in Human Centipede 2, and then come back home, tune into some Michael Savage on the radio. That’d be cute. That would get you laid I bet.