Chicago's WLS Radio is a hub of conservative chatter, home to a daily barrage of oil drilling hysteria and RINO-blasting. The weekday roster includes syndicated stalwarts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin, as well as slew of local personalities, including a morning show hosted by Don Wade and the increasingly conservative Roma, and programs from Mancow Muller and Roe Conn.  On Sunday nights, the station also broadcasts the "Political Shoot-Out" show hosted by conservative activist and Chicago Daily Observer editorial board member Tom Roeser.  Among the local personalities, he may be in a league of his own.

Take this blog post he penned the day after Barack Obama was elected president. Earlier in the week, the Tribune's Eric Zorn highlighted a particularly strange excerpt in which Roeser bemoans the fact that "5-pronged standard Christianity is largely out-of-date," replaced by what he consideres a nationwide orgiastic embrace of rock music.

But it gets better. An astute Zorn reader noticed a striking similarity between Roeser's piece and a 1987 Allan Bloom novel. When Zorn asked him about the slew of almost identical phrases, Roeser claimed Bloom was just an influence. Judge for yourself:

Tom Roeser: America has no significant culture but rock music. It has great appeal; barbaric appeal to sexual wantonness, undeveloped and untutored.

Allan Bloom: But rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. (p.73)

Tom Roeser: The young understand that rock has the cadence of sexual intercourse and they revel in the industry that develops the taste for orgiastic state of orgasm associated with sex, celebrating puppy love and polymorphous attractions that shield them from traditional shame.

Allan Bloom: Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse.... An enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex...the lyrics celebrate puppy love as well as polymorphous attractions, and fortify them against traditional ridicule and shame. (p.73-74)

Tom Roeser: ... What is real is the grunt, bodily contact, a throwback to cannibalism and gladiatorial combats.

Allan Bloom: People of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and gladiatorial combats (p.75).

Plagarism aside, my favorite section of the rambling, half-coherent piece is Roeser's nameless allusion to Tonight Show band leader Kevin Eubanks:

We elected the president we deserve because he is cool. But also because he is black. That makes us feel good. Take a look at the slouching, grinning guitarist on the Moosejaw show (Jay Leno). Seeing him strum, seeing them defiant…seeing Obama trotting up the steps…makes us feel so tolerant, filled with a smarmy hypocritical version of brotherly love to replace morals.

Considering Roeser's theory that America chose Obama in order to simply feel "cool" and "tolerant," I wonder what he'd have to say about the numerous stories of unabashed bigots in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere telling canvassers that they planned to vote for the "n***er" this election year.  It's pretty obvious that feeling "cool" wasn't the highest priority for these folks.

Roeser's emphasis on Obama's blackness is also rather ironic considering his assertion back in 2006 -- also flagged by Zorn -- that the only reason the "mullatto" Obama was being considered for a presidential run was because he looked "near Caucasian."

You can't make this stuff up.