November 21, 2009
UTNE READER

Dixie Chicks Protest Engineered by GOP

April 2003
Craig Cox Utne.com 
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The spontaneous patriotic response to a recent anti-war remark by Dixie Chicks? singer Natalie Maines appears to have been engineered by National Republican Party, not freedom-loving country music fans.

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The Texas-born Maines reportedly angered country music fans across the country by telling a London audience that she was ?ashamed? to call President Bush a Texan. Indignant country music listeners subsequently flooded radio stations demanding they stop playing Dixie Chicks songs, and a South Carolina promoter scheduled an alternative concert to compete with the group?s May 1 gig in Greenville, South Carolina.

But as Doug Thompson reports for Capitol Hill Blue, the whole ?spontaneous? uproar was apparently generated by the Republican Party, which sent out thousands of e-mails instructing the party faithful to complain to their local country radio stations. National GOP staffers themselves hit the phone lines, demanding stations remove the group?s music from playlists.

The altenative concert, reportedly promoted by conservative radio talk show host Mike Gallagher, is actually the work of the South Carolina Republican Party, writes Thompson.

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