Recently I was driving home from work and started flipping around the radio dial for something to listen to. I caught a few minutes of commentary from one of the major conservative talk show hosts.
His subject was the Obama campaign and the connection to the radical enviromental movement with regard to gas prices and drilling for oil. He decried the fact that they oppose virtually all forms of drilling and that this is harmful to both our national security and economy.
Now I don’t entirely disagree with his position, it is true that the hard core enviromental movement is fairly determined to send us back to the horse and buggy days. But his commentary went on to attack virtually the entire cause of enviromentalism, denying any form of global warming and seemingly asserting that ‘what is good for industry is good for America’.
Now I think most of us fall somewhere in between these two extremes, supporting reasonable enviromental protections but also recognizing that you need to balance things with the needs of modern society and our own national security.But this host chose to decry one form of extremism by resorting to another one.
This of course is not an exclusive pervue of the right. On the left we have Air America and hosts who regularly attack President Bush and the right for everything from 9/11 to the sinking of the Titanic. Again, in some cases they have a legitimate point to make when they call the right for going to far but they take it so far the other way that they become nothing but an alter image of those they attack.
Then we have people like Michael Savage, who seems to hate everyone in politics (which is not shocking since he seems to hate just about everyone in general). For those of you who don’t know who Mr. Savage is, he is a talk show host out of San Francisco who is theoretically a right winger but pretty much dislikes anyone to the left of Genghis Kahn. I try not to listen to him very often but the other day I was with a friend and was stuck hearing his diatribe.
He started with his standard attack on pretty much anyone who is not a straight white Christian, then he went on to score a hat trick by attacking McCain, Bush and Obama all in one segment, calling all of their speeches weak willed pablum (I suspect the last speech he really liked was at Nuremberg).
Now in all fairness to Mr. Savage he is a very smart man and I suspect that he is often correct on his critiques, but he overwhelms any of his accuracy by being so fanatically radical on everything.
What I would like to see out there are some talk show hosts who are rational. This does not mean that they have to be balanced or on one side of the spectrum or the other. What I want is for them to be fair and reasonable. The closest I have found are some local hosts named Armstrong and Getty. They are fairly conservative but they never allow things to get too far.
It would be nice if we could find more people to follow that example