. . . June
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Into The Next Stage: Why Did Dr. Laura Get In Trouble When Bill Maher Didn’t?
By GUY AOKI (First published in The Rafu Shimpo on August 26, 2010
Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Hypocrite. Giving marriage and family advice for 31 years when she hated her parents, didn’t talk to her mother for 18-20 years (before she was found dead in her condo two months after succumbing to heart disease), and her first marriage broke up after only five years. While defending her right to “free speech,” after the conservative host said she found a magazine that featured “stealth pornography” in a surf shop and the store owner denied it, she sued him for libel asserting he had ruined her reputation. The judge threw out the lawsuit calling it “frivolous.” And the “good doctor” had to settle the $4 million counter-lawsuit out of court.
Oh and quitter too. After not being religious for most of her life, Schlessinger, her second husband, and son converted to Orthodox Judaism in 1996 but changed her mind in 2003. She began the Laura Schlessinger Foundation in 1998 but by 2004 found it too difficult and expensive to keep underwriting. She initiated a bi-weekly column for the Santa Barbara News Press in 2006 but stopped writing in the middle of the following year, then started it up again only to give up in December 2008 (hey, I’ve been doing my column for 18 1/2 years!).
Whenever I accidentally caught her syndicated radio show, I could only listen for 10 seconds because she invariably cut off the callers and dispensed advice like some psychic who didn’t need to hear the rest of the details to understand the situation. And she was so abrasively annoying.
On Aug. 10, when she got into trouble for repeating “the N-Word” while giving a black caller, “Jade,” advice on how to deal with her white husband’s white family and friends, I thought about Bill Maher and our debates on “Politically Incorrect” nine years earlier.
He also said similar things: He as a white person should be able to say “nigga” because it had become such a part of pop culture that it was not offensive as “nigger.” So why did that part of the discussion pass without much notice while Dr. Laura felt the need to end her show as of December of this year? Maybe because hers was a one-sided debate and she exuded insensitivity as the host.
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