On Saturday Swanson Dinners' impeachment site elected to post "Tone Deaf Nerds and Losers for Hillary and Mandatory Dance Lessons." We're not fans of Swanson TV Dinners. But this went beyond the usual crap we expect. It's a video of a local act performing at a Hillary get-together and, no, they aren't tone deaf and, no, they don't need mandatory dance lessons.
David Swanson is a sad, sad man. He feels the need to ridicule a local group that was probably thrilled that a video of them performing turned up online. That's probably the biggest shot at fame they're ever going to get and that's not meant as an insult to them just noting the realities of the music business.
To smear them as if they're a big musical act just because they support Hillary is rather disgusting. Before we watched the videos, we felt it was as if Stephen Holden went to Dayton, Ohio, and wrote a review of a local group's performance where he slammed them by Madison Square Garden standards. Then we watched the video and saw that they were in fact a tuneful, tight act with some very strong vocalists. Music criticism is not Swanson Dinner's territory for obvious reasons. It's one thing to hold established professionals up to a set of standards, it's another to tear apart a local act that's just trying to make a living. The latter is, in fact, shameful. Maybe Swanson didn't notice, but there's a child on stage as part of the act. Did he feel holding the act up to ridicule was good for that small child?*
But Swanson Dinners has been sort of shameful for awhile now. As Ruth reported February 6th, Dennis Kucinich pulled impeachment off the table that day on national radio. He'll get back to it, he told Randi Rhodes, after the election. What's followed at Swanson's TV Dinners can only be described as "conspiracy theories." Plural. Not one, not two, but many. And each day has found Swanson grabbing an eraser and wiping the chalk board clean to start another.
Focusing on ripping apart local musicians (and children) won't wipe away the same.