In the interest of genuine fairness and balance, I have to reply to your defense of Alan Colmes, which makes me think you might have a brain tumor.
Feb. 19, 2007 — Geneva (apj.us) — I happen to like Alan Colmes.
Yet having Alan Colmes as the so-called "voice of Liberals" on FOX News Channel makes my stomach wrench.
I appeared on Colmes's radio show a few times, and I think I put a pretty good full court press on his more rabid Neocon callers and guests. I've done the same in big markets in Texas, Chicago and on the West Coast.
Alan is correct about this: fighting fire with fire is not the best tactic to use against the hard right.
Fighting fire with gasoline is.
The problem for Alan Colmes is that he does not seem to realize the damage that his FOX News Channel co-host Sean Hannity has done to this country through his patrons, Roger Ailes, Judith Regan and Rupert Murdoch — all of whom brag about what they are doing: undermining the poor, the giving, and the all-too-understanding society as he see it.
Between the three of them — and with the help of disgraced but still on-the-air loofah wielder Bill O'Reilly in another vein — they have shredded the underpinning of America's culture created after World War II and the Korean War. They have paved the way for meanness, yes — but worse than that, they openly and knowingly let their sock-puppet-bobblehead guy hosts and four-figure-call-girl-lookalike newsmodels lie about the state of our society so many times during any given television program on FOX News Channel that few are able to separate the fables from the truth any longer. Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and others pounded the stage together, paving the way for the megalomaniacal George W. Bush and his boss, Dick Cheney, to ascend to the Imperial Presidency and lead the world into heartbreak.
Alan does not lie directly. He lies by omission. He is afraid to call a spade a spade. We had a falling out over a single guest — just one guest of many where Alan dropped the ball and in doing so provided his guest to lie about what America is supposed to be about — under the law, not mine or Jane Fonda's idea of what the nation should be.
Rupert Murdoch, evil as he is professionally, decided to bring Oliver North onto the FOX table years ago — as a man to respect for his courage at being a soldier, a marine, an adjutant to Ronald Reagan and much of his cabinet. Yet Colmes knows, or should know, that Oliver North is a convicted felon, that he is responsible for the deaths of thousands of men, women and children in Latin America. Yes. It was Oliver North — laughable "candidate for United States Senator" — that put together Iran Contra, which forced many of the President’s best men, including George H. W. Bush, into the dock — and some of them into jail, where they would have remained had not Bush 41 pardoned them.