For the Country Stations it is very hypocritical to act as though this is some sort of moral principle.
I don't see it as moral principle. It is no more than a simple boycott, for actions that are disliked.
While the Chicks did have the right to say what they said, the country stations also had the right to no longer play their music.
There is no constitutional guarantee of airtime for performers, last time I checked.
I would be the last to disagree with your point about the country radio stations being allowed to no longer play the Dixie Chicks' music.
For one thing, it helps galvanize the point that shitkickers are politically intolerant and pliable clay for the Right Wing wealth mongers, and always have been. It grew, I believe, out of the cauldron of Dixie America, who slavishly carried the banners of the Colonels of the Southern Counties, especially helped by their engendered racism. You are never quite at the bottom as long as somebody throws someone else beneath you.
Altman's NASHVILLE made the point, which was intiated by Nixon, who slouchingly repaired to the Grand Ole Opry when he was in the greatest heat re Watergate, before they ran him out of office.
What I would disagree with is any contention that shitkicker radio should be allowed to continue their iggy-minded intolerance without being confronted heavilly by those who disagree about persecuting the Dixie Chicks for their political stance.
True, it would escalate into a sharply dividied political profile in America, but let's face, it is inevitable that America assert itself in the face of these compliant, suck-up shitkickers who condone a wrongful war and a corrupt administration, as well as other pocket forces who endorse blindly imperialistic groups like the Neocons, as long as they operate and fester and grow under Republican Party. There is little difference between the boundaries of evangelical fruitcake America and puppet, always RW-compliant-American shitkickery. Note the times when country radio as a unified voice are heard--it has been during stresses of hard Right Wing enterprise.
The difference between the Vietnam War and this war is that we had a large number of college students who were not programmed to believe that only craven attrition and crass survival mentiality should define American zeitgeist.
Those students during the Vietnam War had not yet been programmed into an all-encompassing narcissism that would render them confused and unavailable for real political debate.
The only thing that is going to save America from the current ominverous corruption is for the Left to pick up the mantel. Since the elected Democrats are largely long since bought and paid for by the very people that their constituents voted them in to combat against, it is clear that the map of meaningful strategy must change: it must grow from the roots.
I propose, for those who would fight for the right of the Dixie Chicks to retain their freedom of speech, to boycott and worse any shitkicker mentality that continues to strut its ignorance.
It must never be forgotten that American History proves that nothing is gained or maintained without a fight. If you have lost the heart for a fight, then you must hunker in for a low and crass existence, and like itl.
Waits for the arguments that endorse the miscalculation that American shitkickery is the soul of America.
Shitkickery was merely the forerunner of all those groups who rarely play an actual thought out, but continue to ape endorsement of those powers who keep those very shitkickers in their low class digs.
"When will they ever learn . . . when will they EVER learn . . ."