I run hot and cold with Hugh Hewitt. Sometimes he’s so stubbornly wrongheaded it’s infuriating. Besides the fact that he just doesn’t seem to understand that Joel Stein is a satirist — Harriet Myers for the Supreme Court?!
However, earlier this week he celebrated ten years on talk radio and ran a 3-hour look back. It made me realize I’d missed the program, so I bought a premium membership.
Some of this retrospective was painful: to this day I simply cannot handle even hearing “live” coverage of 9/11, and Hewitt’s show was a morning show that day…
Hewitt fans re-enjoyed classics like “the disasterous interview with Andrew Sullivan”; the parody “interview with Andrew Sullivan” in the next segment, brilliantly improvised by Lileks (audio); the ethnomusicologist who was outraged by Hewitt’s off-hand use of the word “gals”; clips of the late Dean Barnett and the not-late Mark Steyn, Emmett of the Unblinking Eye and others.
PLUS: David Frum takes a whipping, boy howdy!
PS: Richard Dawkins is insufferable and clearly doesn’t get out much (This is even more brutal as audio, with Dawkin’s accent and all) —
RD: There’s massive archaeological evidence, there’s massive evidence of all kinds. It’s just not comparable. No…if you talk to any ancient historian of the period, they will agree that it is not good historical evidence.
HH: Oh, that’s simply not true. Dr. Mark Roberts, double PhD in undergraduate at Harvard has written a very persuasive book upon this. I mean, that’s an astounding statement. Are you unfamiliar with him?
RD: All right, then there may be some, but a very large number of ancient historians would say…
HH: Well, you just said there were none. So there are some that you are choosing not to confront.
RD: You sound like a lawyer.
HH: I am a lawyer.
RD: Oh, for God’s sake. Are you? Okay. I didn’t know that. All right. (…)
RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?
HH: Yes.
RD: You seriously do?
HH: Yes.
RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?
HH: Yes.
RD: My God.
HH: Yes. My God, actually, not yours. But let me…
RD: I’ve realized the kind of person I’m dealing with now.
***
One of the highlights of the anniversary show was “Gorelero”. It’s a list of Al Gore’s incredible lies. By incredible, I mean it is really really long and you just won’t believe that after this devastating 2000 bit (which has been rerun a lot and reprinted all over the web) Al Gore was able to remain in public life, let alone win a Nobel Prize.
