If he [Savage] is a liberal provocateur pretending to be a conservative, or more likely just a performer, he is, either way, a lamentably popular one. ~David Klinghoffer

Savage’s popularity is lamentable, mostly because he is crass, blasts death metal at his audience and appeals to the worst of nationalism and the pseudo-intellectualism in which the seer can discern in every social problem the offspring of Leninism.  Perhaps Mr. Klinghoffer is skeptical about the man’s credentials, but if Savage is a liberal agent provocateur he has maintained his cover for at least ten years.  Those who have listened to his program since the beginning, or who have at least encountered it over the years, can tell you that he has not substantially changed his m.o. 

His disillusionment with Bush was complete with the President’s support for amnesty, but he has been very useful for the GOP as a major generator and distributor of anti-Democrat rhetoric; on the telling issue of the day, he is a supporter of the Iraq war and typically finds fault with the management of the war for reasons that might make a neocon blush–we are not being heavy-handed and forceful enough, and we need to bust more heads, period.  I remember driving across the country during those eerie days following September 11 and hearing Michael Savage rip into George Bush’s “cowardice” when he flew off to Nebraska after the attacks saying something like, “Where are our political leaders?”  (The contempt for the government you could hear in his voice was not something that someone stage-managed by the left could provide.)  He then began to randomly quote from the Old Testament about the coming of the Assyrians or some such (he will occasionally throw out such random scriptural citations). 

To the polished conservative pundit and intellectual, this no doubt sounds like the gibberish that it is, but in its raw, unmediated form it is the kind of red meat rhetoric that attracts a lot of supporters who are weary of a Republican and conservative establishment that sounds scarcely any different from their liberal counterparts on Savage’s trio of “language, borders and culture.”  What Michael Savage thinks he means by “culture” is anyone’s guess (it would probably make us all either laugh or cry), but he is talking about things in a crude way that resonate with people who are tired of seeing their country transformed in front of them against their will and with the connivance of the political class.  If you think Savage is putting on an act, consider the following: this is someone who is so hostile to Muslims that he, knowing nothing about Thailand, assumed that the coup in Thailand was an Islamist takeover because Gen. Sonthi was a Muslim.  He then raged and raved about the coup because he was aghast that the military had overthrown a “democracy” and suspended the constitution.  This mish-mash of geopolitical ignorance, enthusiasm for democracy and reflexive distrust of all Muslims everywhere may be many things, but the product of a left-wing psy-op designed to confuse and mislead conservatives it is not.  It is, for good or ill, a perfect snapshot of the confused state of popular conservatism in this country.  But if Michael Savage is a walking parody of modern-day conservatism in some ways, this is not because he is what some leftie thinks people on the right sound like, but because the quality of thinking on the right has deteriorated thanks in part to the medium of talk radio and the dubious mix of hyperbole, nationalism and militarism that usually counts as proof of conservatism for a lot of people.  That Mr. Klinghoffer believes he might credibly cast Savage as an agent of the left working to divide conservatives against each other by actually holding the administration’s feet to the fire when it abandons the country on the immigration and other such issues tells us a great deal about how far out of touch some Republican and conservative pundits are.