It’s amazing how divisive and myopic talk radio is these days.  I’m listening now to Sean Hannity’s program on Sirius and I’m so bummed that I can’t pick up the phone to dial into his program.  Always the maker of ridiculously hypocritical and sensational statements, he is now complaining about a joke that Al Franken apparently made on the topic of rape during a writing session back in his SNL days.  The joke was an off-color one to be sure and the fact that it was told years ago should only provide Franken with limited shelter.  What bothers me, though, is that there is absolutely no mention of the rape joke that John McCain was purported to have told some 22 years ago.   Nor was there a mention of the equally lame and off-color jokes that he continues to tell to this day, including the one about hoping that increased sales of cigarettes would quicken the onset of death for the Iranian people, or the one where he joked that Chelsea Clinton’s homeliness was the result of Janet Reno being her father.  I write this not because I’m a fan of Al Franken.  In fact, I find him quite annoying.  Rather, I want to point out how shamelessly one-sided political commentators are these days.  Partisanship is alive and well in Congress for a reason folks.

Each time someone of questionable character passes away, I wait with bated breath for Christopher Hitchens’ sharp-tongued critique of the deceased.   After referring to the late Jerry Falwell as a “toad of a man”, Hitchens did similar service to the legacy of Jesse Helms, whom Hitchens described as a “provincial redneck“.

I make no apology for calling him a provincial redneck, because that, to be fair to him once more, was how he thought of himself and even described himself. It was a scandal that a man with so little knowledge of the outside world should have had such a stranglehold on American foreign policy for so long. He once introduced Benazir Bhutto as the prime minister of India. All right, that could have happened to anybody. But what about the hearings on North Korea in which he made repeated references to “Kim Jong the Second”? In order to prevent any repetition of this idiotic gaffe, Helms’ staff propped up a piece of card on which was clearly written the pronunciation “Kim Jong ILL.” The senator from North Carolina duly made the adjustment, referring thenceforth to the North Korean despot as “Kim Jong the Third.”