I never spent much time listening to talk radio. My various occupations over the years — professor, writer of software and, more recently, unpaid blogger — always demanded my mind’s full attention, leaving no room for the distraction posed by a conversation in the background, especially a conversation dealing with matters of importance. Thus, I did not become a regular listener of the Ron Smith Show until last spring, when I began a project to repair and repaint my entire house.

I was almost too late. Ron Smith died last night following a battle with pancreatic cancer. It was a mercifully short battle that lasted only a little over two months — he was diagnosed with cancer in mid-October — but it was scant consolation for his many devoted listeners.

It was my son, Steve, who brought Ron Smith to my attention about eight years ago. At that time the Ron Smith Show had the three-to-six afternoon time slot on WBAL, and Steve used to listen to him during his long commute. The war in Iraq was still new, and virtually all conservatives supported former President Bush’s decision to go to war — all except Ron Smith, that is. The fact that Smith, who was so conservative on so many other issues, opposed the war got Steve’s attention and, eventually, his agreement.

Ron Smith’s political views could probably best be described as “paleolibertarian”, but to my knowledge he never called himself that. He had an instinctual mistrust of the use of force to accomplish anything and thus was the perfect person to confront the frequent caller or guest whose solution to every problem can be summed up in the phrase, “there ought to be law”.

Laws, Smith said, seldom accomplish their stated goals, especially when they mandate outcomes. In reality, such laws — and Bush’s No Child Left Behind law is a prime example of this — end up mandating fraud.

By the time I became a regular listener last spring, the Ron Smith Show had moved to the morning nine-to-twelve time slot. I listened to practically the entire show every day — and often found it very depressing. He was very pessimistic about the future of western civilization and believed the United States has had its season in the sun. What made this assessment especially depressing to me is that he based it on facts and logic.

Logic was a weapon Ron Smith used to slay many beasts. I was always amazed at his ability to drill down to the heart of any argument, to marshal facts and reasoning to expose the argument’s unanalyzed assumptions. One of his listeners dubbed him “the voice of reason”, and the label stuck because it was so accurate.

I was also impressed by Smith’s wide-ranging erudition. He was knowledgeable and read widely in many subjects. It was therefore with genuine surprise that I read that his formal schooling ended when he dropped out high school to enlist in the Marine Corps. I should not have been so surprised: no amount of formal education could have given him what he brought to every broadcast.

I will miss Ron Smith. One of the highlights of my short blogging career was a link he posted on his website two and a half years ago to an article I wrote on the suppression of dissent in the global warming debate. But links to my blog posts aren’t what I will miss about him. In the combined cacophony that emerges from the airwaves and the web, his was a voice of reason, and now that voice has been stilled.

Let’s perform a little thought experiment. Let’s pretend that, instead of the statement that Sarah Palin released Wednesday morning, she released a completely different one, a statement that made no mention of a “blood libel”, a statement in which she humbly apologized for using over-the-top rhetoric and violent imagery and promised never to do it again — in other words, the groveling statement her liberal critics say she should have made. How do you suppose it would have been received?

I can tell you how it would have been received. MSNBCs smugly self-righteous Keith Olbermann, his voice an octave lower than usual (as it always is whenever he pronounces his judgments on evil right-wingers), would have called it “unconvincing, insincere and manipulative”. Chris Matthews would whine, “too little, too late. She should have made that statement long before last Saturday.” The New York Times‘s Paul Krugman would denounce Palin for using the word “tragedy” instead of “atrocity” — no, wait, he already did that, after she offered her condolences on her Facebook page Saturday.

Let’s be honest. It doesn’t matter what Sarah Palin says or does. She’s going to be viciously attacked for it.

Yes, Palin is polarizing, and her statements are inflammatory. But this is not an indictment of Palin, because the people who get inflamed by her words are the ones who already hate and fear her. They’ll find anything she says to be inflammatory. If her famous (or infamous, depending on which side of the divide you’re on) Facebook map had daisies instead of crosshairs on it, Palin-haters still would have denounced her. They would have claimed she was implying that the Democrats in the targeted Congressional districts should be pushing up daisies. Read more »

Thanks to CBS News, MSNBC, the Associated Press, Mark Potok, Paul Krugman, Markos Moulitsas and Jane Fonda — yes, that Jane Fonda — we now know who is responsible for the tragic shooting outside a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, Saturday. It’s Sarah Palin!  With some help from Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. I haven’t heard Bill O’Reilly’s name mentioned yet, but I’m sure we will soon enough.

Keith Olbermann anchored MSNBC’s evening coverage of the shooting, and he spent practically the entire evening trying to tie the shooting to Sarah Palin. You see, early last year Palin posted a map of the United States with little targets identifying the Congressional districts where the seats were held by politically vulnerable Democrats. One of the target districts was that of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman who was shot Saturday. (Giffords survived the shooting, but six people, including a Federal judge who was apparently there just to do some grocery shopping, were killed and a dozen others were wounded.)

For good measure, he had Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center on to verify that talk of “death panels” and such inspires unstable people to go out and commit violence. The SPLC, by the way, considers people like Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, Ron Paul supporters and pro-lifers to be dangerous potential terrorists. In fact, it even considers Judge Andrew Napolitano, the most consistent supporter of civil liberties on television, to be a dangerous enabler of terrorists. Read more »

Is Michael Gerson trying for a Pulitzer?

After all, his Washington Post colleague, the faux-conservative Kathleen Parker, won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary this year for being, as she admitted to MSNBC talk show host Joe Scarborough, a “conservative basher”. It worked once; maybe it will work again.

Gerson is part of the Post‘s attempt at being fair and balanced. He is one of a handful of “conservative” writers whose columns are featured on the paper’s Opinion page along with the opinion pieces of a much larger number of liberals (or, as they prefer to call themselves these days, “progressives”).

Like Parker, Gerson is the kind of conservative liberals love — the kind who get their jollies bashing genuine conservatives. And, as Parker has found out, there are definite career advantages to being that kind of conservative.

One of those advantages is that you don’t have to worry about things like facts or logic. As long as you are dissing people on the Right, you can say pretty much whatever you want.

In a column last week that carried the title, “The GOP’s Sarah Palin Problem”, Gerson claimed that “weak, poorly vetted Senate candidates were the main reason that while Republican gains in the House were historic — the largest in 72 years — gains in the Senate were not”. He blamed Palin for this allegedly poor showing. “[Christine] O’Donnell and [Sharron] Angle were gifts of Sen. Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin to their party,” he said. Read more »