RANT! Left Right and Center is named incorrectly
I regularly listen to KCRW’s “Left, Right and Center” on my iPod. While I enjoy the intelligent discussion I think they should rename the program to “Left, Very Left, Ultra Left, and Pretty Far Right”. The show now has a blog so I think it is fair to chastise them a little and condemn them for not being as open as they claim that they are – if they disagree they can say so on their blog.
Tony Blankley does an excellent job of holding down the right. His opinions are typically well thought out and his intellect does a decent job in offsetting the radical left. My biggest complaint is that he always seems to have predicted everything and wrote about it months ago and it is amazing that us mortals have only just now got to where he has been for a long time. It appears that, in his opinion, if we were just smart enough to read his column every week we wouldn’t have any problems in the world.
Arianna Huffington is on so infrequently it is a joke. She used to be on the right when Bill Clinton was the President but now that we have George W. Bush, she has decided to be on the left. She does fine representing the left when she bothers to participate but she is out promoting her books or getting interviewed by the rich and famous so much that she is rarely there. When she is there it seems like she is sending emails on her Blackberry when someone else is talking. She supposedly represents the “progressive blogosphere” (whatever that means) but this doesn’t make sense since Bob heads up TruthDig.com so they really don’t need both Arianna and Bob.
Robert Scheer is so ultra left that he is embarrassing and just saying he is on the left is insulting most of his true positions – they are farther left than just left. I assume the only reason he is on the show is that he is old, can’t find someone else to employ him and he needs the money. To him all of the ills of the world were caused by the Iraq war, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove. He will go to great lengths to find some obscure way to link every bad thing to one, both or all three of them. He is so out of touch with mainstream America that he even supported Dennis Kucinich for President! Bob lives up to his left title though in insisting that all taxes are good and all money should be taken from everybody and given back to those that the government thinks should deserve it.
Matt Miller is supposed to be the center and he is the moderator. Occasionally, he is out doing something else and then we get to hear a real center as the fill in is almost almost always a true centrist. How does someone that worked for President Clinton and is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress call himself a centrist? He is not as far left as Bob and Arianna so I guess that gives the producers the freedom to call him center. He must be right of the producers!
All of them do a very good job of promoting their books. I don’t have a big problem with that but it is obvious that they see this show as a way to sell more titles.
As much as I deride their non-balanced viewpoints, the show is actually quite good. The three of them (when Arianna shows up) try desperately to outwit Tony and, for the most part, fail miserably. They bring up weak ideas and Tony points out that they don’t have all of the facts. Tony usually does the show from Washington DC and I have this feeling that he is laughing at them when he is off microphone.
KCRW MANAGEMENT – FIRE 2 OF THE LEFTISTS ON THIS SHOW AND GET SOMEONE TO BE A TRUE CENTER! FAILING THAT, CHANGE THE NAME OF THE SHOW!
I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.
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