Summary: Featuring guests A.C. Kleinheider, the blogger formerly known as Post Politics and Karl Frisch, the contributor formerly known as Senior Fellow for Media Matters.

A Day without a Kleinheider, Part 1Play ball! It’s opening day but we don’t have just baseball on our minds – there’s the Easter weekend, some jobs chatter, college hoops, and the Tennessee state legislature can’t say boo to the coal lobby so the feds are coming in to take a good hard look at the quaint little practice of mountaintop removal. Plus, A.C. Kleinheider, who provided the solo byline for Post Politics – the go to place for state and local political news and views – until he was let go last week, joins us for a little debriefing, dodging, and dancing. Was he really fired as the result of a racist email? [26.92MB download mp3]Download audio file (liberadio20100405part1.mp3)

A Day without a Kleinheider, Part 2 Our listeners can’t get enough Kleinheider and neither can we so he stays and our listeners ask him some tough questions. Will he or won’t he comment and tell? And Karl Frisch of Media Matters talks Tiger Woods, Jesse James, Justin Beiber, and Ludacris…until he gets back on track and pulls the curtain back on Sarah Palin’s new Fox talk show. Then? You guessed it, we get another fix of Kleinheider. Will he be back again next week? [23.14MB download mp3]
Download audio file (liberadio20100405part2.mp3)

EXTRA: Read the missing last post from Kleinheider.

I admired Jack Kemp back then. He seemed like a different kind of Republican and I knew that I was looking for something different. And on that day in the fall of 1992, he and the President gave reasonably good speeches (at least they seemed so at the time) but I couldn’t shake the fact that no matter how good, decent or inspiring the politician the process was somehow rotten to the core. Turned out I knew far less than the half of it.

Another thing about 1992 and Jack Kemp that has gotten lost in many of the remembrances of him was that it was strongly rumored that Kemp had given seriously consideration to challenging President Bush in the primaries that year.

Kemp, of course, was driving force behind much of the Reagan economic program but his campaign for President had failed to catch fire in 1988 and thus Bush, not he, claimed the mantle of Reagan and the Presidency.

But Jack Kemp, writes Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times, was also the driving force behind another idea – one that wasn’t embraced forcefully by the GOP and is the reason why, decades later, they’re a sinking ship:

Kemp, who died on Saturday from cancer, would later be much better known for his long career as a conservative Republican politician. He had two very big ideas for his party. One was terrific, spot on. The other couldn’t have been more boneheaded. The G.O.P. being the G.O.P. rejected the good idea and went hog wild for the boneheaded one.

Kemp’s good idea was that the Republicans should vastly expand their tent, get past their narrow-mindedness and begin actively seeking the support of blacks and other ethnic minorities.

The G.O.P. would have none of it. It was, after all, the party of the southern strategy, and there was precious little that was racially enlightened about its conservative wing. One of the writers who influenced Kemp’s thinking about politics, William F. Buckley, was at the opposite pole of Kemp’s progressive thinking about race. Buckley took a scurrilous stand in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated the nation’s public schools.

Whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks, according to Buckley. “The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race …”

Kemp was whistling in a hurricane.

Kudos, A.C., for recognizing that Kemp was a “different kind of Republican.” We can only imagine how different things might have been had he fulfilled his promise.

A Kleinheider Joint

An editorial in the City Paper by that smarty-boots A.C. Kleinheider says that Godwin’s Law, and not Senator Andy Berke’s religion, was what made Senator Dewayne Bunch’s “nutritional Nazi police” comment on the floor of the Senate so insulting.

His point is well taken, but Godwin’s Law – which states that “the person who first makes an unwarranted reference to Nazi Germany or Hitler in an argument loses that argument automatically” – and sensitivity to someone’s feelings are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And there are exceptions.

Case in point, Senator Bunch’s bill passed AND he immediately – before any of us “progressive activists” called him out – felt the need to apologize to Senator Berke.

In other words, Senator Bunch hyperbolic comment created discomfort for many reasons.

Here’s the video again. Why? Just because Senator Burchett’s reaction (top left) is fun to watch.

What's the virtue of the Proportional Response?

So in the context of this cartoon, is shooting the person who wrote the economic stimulus package a “proportional response” to disagreeing with it? No, it’s not – or at least it shouldn’t be. Which makes the violence of the thing more frightening than funny (and no, there’s not a hint of satire anywhere to be found). But in light of recent events as well as what our new president represents, the horror of the smoking gun and the bullet-ridden body is much more troublesome than the monkey imagery (which is clearly a riff on the recent rampaging chimp shot by police news story).

Besides, it’s not the first time a president has been compared to a chimp. Just run “chimp” and “George Bush” through an ol’ Google image search.

And to answer Kleinheider’s question, “Is it racist to use the expected knee-jerk reactions of some in order to stoke controversy or just bad taste?,” it’s both. And if you re-write the question this way, “Is it racist to use the empathetic reactions of some in order to stoke controversy,” then it’s evil too. We have to start having serious conversations about race in this country, as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently pointed out, and we must move beyond having them only when an Imus-like controversy pops up.