To Air is Human

One of the great myths promoted and promulgated by the me-first neo-con crowd is not only that the mainstream media is lousy with liberals and liberal bias, but that liberals are inherently “elite” or elitist. We’re not sure where this whole idea comes from, given the well-documented connection between labor and liberalism, as well as the more subtle connection between obscene wealth and selfishness. (This bizarre “limousine liberal” inversion has reached all quarters: Teaching evolution, fer chrissakes, is now considered a badge of liberal elitism, which means that every credible scientist on the face of the planet is a deluded elitist liberal.)

But if you’d like an object lesson in reality, you could do worse than checking out “Left of the Dial,” the Air America documentary that will be broadcast on HBO Thursday night. We haven’t seen it ourselves, but we read that it is a more dramatic story than you might think—the story of how the liberal radio network got off the ground, after very nearly dying in childbirth. As it turns out, the only limousine liberal involved in Air America was Al Franken himself, who in the eleventh hour had to step in and write some hefty personal checks to keep the nascent network going. Many of the network’s key employees worked without pay or benefits in order to see the mission through.

See, there’s the difference between the left and the right in a nutshell—only a Democrat would spend his own money on a cause that was larger than himself. In some quarters, this is called a non-monetary return on investment—but you didn’t hear it from your present goverment monopoly, which looks upon all such do-goodism as essentially evil. (God helps those who help themselves, you know… and presumably punishes those who help others.)