Something I was planning to post before the Big News hit:

Time columnist Joel Stein has substituted a couple of times for right-wing talk-radio host Mike Gallagher. Stein has conservative beliefs, but apparently he's not pure enough for the talk-radio audience. Here he is, in his most recent column, to tell us what he learned as a host:

I had invited a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) on to talk about cockfighting, of which I'm an advocate. Yet just having the PETA woman on the show made listeners think I was a liberal. A caller said the PETA rep was a terrorist, which I agreed with, since the organization totally disrupted last year's Victoria's Secret fashion show. Then he said she was the same as Osama bin Laden. I questioned that, mostly because PETA hasn't killed anyone. He said that all terrorists were equal and that parsing out evil made me a sympathizer. I questioned his epistemology, at which point he called me a "stupid liberal kike," which caused the switchboard guy to hang up on him. That switchboard guy ruined all the fun.

..."A conservative can spot a liberal a mile away. You are, or you ain't," Gallagher told me. "It's not just an ideology or a philosophy. We have an ability to cut to the chase. Black and white isn't a bad thing. Liberals gravitate toward the gray to muddy the waters, to muddle people's thinking..."

...When I sat down to host the show, playing with all the dials until I realized the producer had wisely taken away all my powers, I was startled by the intro. It was a quote from Al Pacino in The Recruit.... Pacino yells, "We believe in good and evil. And we choose good. We believe in right and wrong. And we choose right. Our cause is just. Our enemies everywhere. They're all around us."

Y'know, I'm still waiting for that Nicholas Kristof op-ed about non-Democratic haters.