From the LA Times: I decided to listen to one entire day’s original programming, all 17 hours. So at 6 a.m. on Good Friday — the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, the day after Condoleezza Rice testified before the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks — I tuned in to 1580, turned on my computer to take notes and sat with both until 11 p.m. It may have been the most boring day of my life. My fellow liberals have long argued that they haven’t been able to match the conservative success on talk radio because the medium is ideally suited to conservatives. According to this self-serving argument, conservatives are more willing than liberals to engage in nasty name-calling and to see everything in black and white, while liberals — concerned with nuance and complexity — are inevitably reasonable, willing to consider both sides of an issue. But President W’s policies — especially in Iraq — have now so enraged liberals that they are willing to play dirty too. Hence, Air America. Not….
Limbaugh does his name-calling so creatively and hilariously that it usually winds up being entertaining. As repellent as I find his politics, Limbaugh is an entertainer as well as a polemicist, and after liberal talk-show experiments with such policy wonks as former Govs. Jerry Brown of California and Mario Cuomo of New York all failed, the folks behind Air America promised that they’d learned their lesson. They too would find ideologues who are funny. Nice try.
Adieu, sweet, sweet Alice. Go thou gently, (and quietly for the love of all that’s good and holy), into that dark and radio-silent night.