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Why can't right-wingers come up with a talk show host or pundit one might actually like to know and hang out with? I mean, sensible people generally do their best to avoid loud, boorish, attention junkies, yet in the world of Fox News and the imbroglio we call talk radio, it is exactly those qualities that seem to earn the most coveted positions.
Being an ACLU card-carrying, "public option"-supporting Lib makes me a bit biased, of course, but it also compels me to try and find at least a spark of goodness in everyone -- that's what we good Libs do. But, believe me, this is no easy task when confronted with such raging dysfunction as:
1. Bill O'Reilly (bullying, loud-mouthed narcissist)
2. Grover Norquist, (aura of self-importance and nastiness that would make Il Duce blush)
3. William Bennett (classic "do as I say, not as I do" moralist)
4. Anne Coulter (psycho-sexual mess / borderline sociopath)
5. Sarah Palin (chronic synaptic misfire / finds reality to be optional)
6. Dick Cheney (paranoid, humorless, determined to make the world as miserable as he appears to be)
[For propriety's sake, I am purposely leaving Glenn Beck out of this because his disorders appear to be far more serious than the garden-variety personality problems suffered by his colleagues]
Any one of these six listed blowhards could clear out a dinner party by the time the entree was served. And, if they all happened to be guests at the party, something akin to The Lord of the Flies would surely break out -- the entree ultimately consisting of each other.
To be fair, I'm sure we have a few famous liberals with personality
problems, as well. But, they must do a better job concealing them,
because, try as I might, I can't come up with a lefty host, pundit or
politician with a temperament even approaching the bad-natured, mean
spirit of a Norquist, O'Reilly, Coulter or Cheney -- or with the
astonishing air-headedness and acidity of Sarah Palin or Oklahoma Sen. Jim "I
don't have to read it, or know what's in it. I'm going to oppose it
anyways." Inhofe. Even when Michael Moore goes predator, there is
almost always an underlying decency and good humor about him -- the
Charlton Heston interview notwithstanding.
Imagine Rachel Maddow doing Bill O'Reilly's "Fuck it, we'll do it liiiive" routine.
Doesn't compute, does it? Or, how about Ed Schultz urging all good Democrats to begin roughing up Republicans, as Coulter once suggested -- in the reverse, of course -- on the Lou Dobbs Show (Dobbs is getting there, by the way). Or Keith Olbermann displaying the astonishing insensitivity to suggest that a tax -- or lack of tax, for that matter -- is comparable to the Holocaust (Grover Norquist characterizing the estate tax in an NPR interview). These scenarios simply could not happen.
This may be why the Left has such a hard time competing with the Right on talk radio. Like trout and babies, American audiences love things that wiggle. And nothing wiggles more than mindless, incendiary statements like Limbaugh's "I hope Obama fails," or the endless list of 50,000-watt Neanderthals shouting, "The Democrat Party is a bunch of socialist-fascist-commie-Nazis!"
Americans demand their wiggles, and because Jerry Springer can't be on twenty-four hours a day, we look for them elsewhere.
What exactly is it about the Right that gives them such a leg-up on the Left in the jerk department? Sure a lot of the loud, obnoxious stuff is P.T. Barnum-style pimping for ratings and book sales, but a lot of it is genuine, heartfelt ugliness.
If Freud was right, the Hannitys and O'Reillys of the world were doomed to dysfunction by the age of six. But, what if it's the other way around? Maybe during college or sometime during young adulthood they were poisoned by an influential professor or coworker -- or maybe by a single reading of "The Fountainhead," sending them spiraling toward a worldview informed by social Darwinism, xenophobia, and God's hatred of poor people, brown people and homosexuals.
With that stuff oozing throughout their psyches, crowding out any rational thought or humanity, it's easy to see how they could become accomplished "wigglers."
Who knows? I guess these are questions better left to behaviorists. But, I -- for one relatively well adjusted Lefty -- thank my lucky stars that when I read The Fountainhead in my freshman year, I couldn't stop laughing.
Maybe that's why I get invited to dinner parties.
