Sorry For What You Heard
I feel I have to apologize for something you heard during one of our national shows yesterday. Obviously, the content is completely out of our control, but I still feel the need to say something.
It was on the Glenn Beck Program yesterday. Mr. Beck was out due to last minute back issues, and his regular foils Pat and Stu filled in. I’ve been in that position before…being asked to fill in on a national show after it had already started because the host took ill, literally with 10 minutes notice…so it’s hard to prepare material for use on the air last minute like that.
But that’s no excuse for some of what I heard. I thought it might be a quick reference, but it circled back in the second hour with the same refrain.
The diatribe was that tomorrow’s presidential debate will likely not yield much information; I certainly agree, I think all these debates are a waste of time. And the silly rules put in place by the Republican National Committee show they cannot be trusted to be in charge of nationalizing debates like this.
But their solution was to eliminate those who were lower in the polls, to deny them a chance to articulate their vision. The real ignorance was calling some of them “people you’ve never heard of”…Perry Johnson, Doug Burgum, and others by name…people you have very much heard of, because you attend their events in Iowa or comment when we have them on the radio here.
Perhaps the shallow folks who have already picked their favorites don’t know the full field…but I have 15 Republican candidates on my list, and I dare say virtually all of you could easily name 10 of the 15…and probably more than that.
I don’t expect the rest of the nation to follow the contest as closely as we in Iowa do…that’s our job, to take it seriously and help winnow the field through actually showing up and stating a preference at the caucuses. The job of people who hold a microphone is to add to intelligent conversation, not cause the audience to wonder if they were this out of step on this topic—how off the mark are they on others?
So again, I apologize for those portions of that program yesterday that were so inaccurate to the point of being a waste of your time. Let’s hope that’s an aberration, and not the common practice.
