Commenters occasionally complain that I reserve my venom for conservative radio talk show hosts and ignore rabble rousers like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. My response typically has been:
1. There are no liberal radio talk shows in Billings (Ed Schultz apparently is still on in Laurel, but I can barely tune in that AM station even when I am on the West End).
2. The point of these weekly posts is to report on what I hear on the radio as I am delivering the Outpost for 10 or 12 hours every Thursday. Olbermann has nothing to do with that, and I don’t listen to him anyway.
I should amend the second point now to confess that I have, in fact, been watching Olbermann a couple of times a week in recent months. Oddly, I particularly like to listen on Thursdays, when I am too tired after delivery to do much else and when his hectoring from the left serves as something of a counterbalance to the hectoring I’ve heard all day from the right.
And I admit I kind of like him. He gets preachy, which can wear thin, but I grew up listening to preachers, so I don’t mind too much. He obsesses over Fox News, which is pointless but somewhat entertaining. He is less politically doctrinaire than Hannity or Limbaugh (he sometimes criticizes Democrats!) and he interviews more interesting people.
Most useful is that he exposes me to a world I wouldn’t know existed if all I had to go on was commercial talk radio. Last week, for example, Olbermann and Rachel Maddow both seemed to think it was news that Sen. John Ensign’s parents paid nearly $100,000 to the family of a former staffer with whom he had an affair. Talk radio didn’t seem to notice. Could it be that Ensign is a Republican? Yes, indeed.
He also talked about new evidence that the CIA misleads Congress. You couldn’t expect talk radio to touch that because it would undermine their claims that Nancy Pelosi made it all up.
And Olbermann pretty consistently talks about torture and Gitmo, which are pretty much unmentionable on talk radio, unless they can think of a way to blame Obama for it. No, on Thursday talk radio gave us the same old themes:
1. Global warming is a hoax.
2. The stimulus isn’t working, will never work, could never work.
3. Obama is a weakling who can’t stop apologizing for America.
4. America has the greatest health care system ever devised.
The last couple of weeks, with most of the regular hosts on vacation, the exact same points were made in exactly the same way by indistinguishable guest hosts, all of whom seem to have been grafted from exactly the same tree.
Ho-hum.
Olbermann at least weighs in on issues that, while they don’t strike me as particularly liberal or conservative at heart, have nevertheless become partisan footballs. And if I am going to listen to one blinkered point of view all morning and afternoon, it’s kind of nice to hear in the evening that another side exists.
Think about what the term”liberal” meant in 1972 versus now. Modern day Democrats want nothing to do with the lower classes, are undermining health care reform, and are leading the charge in solidifying the permanent occupation of Iraq, a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and an invasion of Pakistan.
So when I read what you write about liberals and conservatives, I wonder where you stood in 1972 and if you are aware how much the tide has moved you.