In addition to the insanely busy schedule I had this fall, I just haven’t felt much incentive to do talk radio blogging lately. There’s just nothing there.
Mike Huckabee is the biggest disappointment. Before he got a radio show, my take on him was pretty simple: a nice guy who has shown nothing to make me think he would be a good president. Now it’s this: not all that nice a guy who has shown nothing to make me think he would be a good radio host.
Really, has the man ever in his life had even one thought that didn’t absolutely conform with conventional Republican thinking? At least Limbaugh will say crazy stuff at times, which makes his show a tad unpredictable. Hannity never has an unconventional (perhaps the adjective is superfluous?) thought, but at least he likes to argue with liberals on occasion.
Huckabee has nothing. He’s boring, predictable and saccharine. On the rare occasions when he accidentally books an interesting guest, he is so determined to hold everything to a single segment that he never gets even six inches below the surface.
He is no better when he veers away from politics. He interviewed a band member of Chicago recently, and the entire interview consisted solely of variations on a single question: Did you know that I think you guys are great?
So it’s a grim world in talk radio land. Glenn Beck is just too far out there to listen to anymore. Michael Smerconish is still a model of fairness, but I can’t warm to the guy. The intolerable Michael Savage has finally been replaced by Jerry Doyle, a move that had to be an improvement. Doyle, to his credit, will take on Republicans as willingly as he takes on Democrats, but his standard libertarian rhetoric wears thin fast. Yesterday, he did a whole segment whose sole point seemed to be that people with food allergies are whiners, fakers and losers. And that was a “Best of Jerry Doyle” segment.
NPR’s three hours of Thursday afternoon jazz is sounding better all of the time.
“Conventional Republican thinking” does not prevail in the Executive branch of the federal government, nor in half the Legislative branch, nor most of the time in the Judicial branch. A good thing, too, or else we’d have a massive and unpayable national debt, a coming crisis in “entitlement” spending, a high rate of unemployment, a society verging on having more takers than makers, and a dumbing-down of most forms of entertainment with violent action replacing dialogue and profanity replacing all that annoying saccharine stuff.
Huckabee’s not only a Republican, but an ordained Baptist pastor, too. Why do they let guys like that on the air?
In my church going days, I heard a lot of ministers like Huckabee: profoundly sincere, uncontroversial, passionless, uninspired. I couldn’t stand them for a half-hour a week. Now he wants two hours a day out of me?