Talk radio, except for the lame Air America nonsense, is all conservative bluster. Air America’s lame because they’ve tried applying the Rush Bluster Format to some kind of liberal mindset. Who ever heard of blustering liberals? Anyway, Rush Limbaugh invented the current style of gravel-throated talk radio, and he’s riding high this week on a mount provided by Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader, Democrat of Nevada, who actually wrote a protest letter to the head of Clear Channel Radio, which owns his syndicator and most of the major stations who carry Rush’s show, over something Rush said. I heard him this morning, on my local Limbaugh-formated AM station, KIT Yakima, cutting Sen. Reid to ribbons in his inimitable high dudgeon style. I can only take so much of Rush–or his many clones on the left or right. I do agree with Rush that Reid was ill-advised to take him on. Reid really did position himself perfectly to be accused of coming out strongly against freedom of speech–and Mark Mays, President of Clear Channel, called him on it. Our politics is broken, talk radio contributed hugely to its fracture, and is unlikely to help fix it. If our only choices are bluster and insults of the right or the left, we’ll continue to believe there’s nothing else. We aren’t stupid. Our poll-climbing politicians and media bosses just think we are.

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