Wednesday, April 05, 2006

On the subject of Katie Couric, who's moving to CBS to anchor the evening news, you can find people over on the left who grumble that she's been known to repeat GOP spin or let right-wing interviewees off easy, but you have to go to the right to find people who describe Couric as CBS's "perky new propagandist" -- someone who's gone, in the words of Front Page Magazine's Lowell Ponte, "from humble beginnings to a worldwide leftist platform."

That's great stuff. And while I like Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann, and Air America is just dandy, what I really want is a lefty talk-show host who would book Lowell Ponte for tonight's show and just let him rant -- for example, about how Katie Couric is Fidel Castro's handmaiden in America. Don't put a liberal on the other side -- just book a TV-business insider and watch that person's jaw drop. I think it's high time we had a talk-show host who'd let the far right reveal itself as the freak show it really is.

And speaking of Front Page Magazine, the next time David Horowitz is on TV -- whatever the subject of the show -- I want someone to ask why we should take anything he says seriously when he devotes space in his online rag to a Clinton-bashing interview with Melrose Larry Green, a guy whose claim to fame is his past habit of standing on an L.A. streetcorner holding up crude hand-lettered signs promoting The Howard Stern Show, signs such as "HOWARD STERN IS MY HOMEBOY."

Horowitz gives Melrose Larry a great deal of space to plug his new book, Why the Clintons Belong in Prison. The reasons the Clintons belong in prison apparently include Hillary Clinton's sexuality ("It is common knowledge that Hillary is bi-sexual," Larry says in the interview) and the couple's attitude toward Jews (Larry says they hate Jews so much that -- bafflingly -- they insult each other by using anti-Semitic slurs).

Explain to me again: Why is Horowitz taken seriously? Why is his Academic Bill of Rights taken seriously? Why hasn't he become a laughingstock?

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