Goodbye Paul Harvey

It seems highly ironic that, even as Rush Limbaugh was offering his usual mix of blather and bluster, all devoid of intellectual content or even basic fact - he misquoted a line in the Declaration of Independence and attributed it to the Constitution - Paul Harvey, the dean of conservative radio commentary, died at ninety. This is sad, and for more reasons than one. One big reason is that Harvey, despite his provincial Midwestern outlook, was in fact a fair-minded guy. He told President Nixon to get out of Vietnam after realizing that the war was unwinnable, and he opposed - yes, opposed - censorship during the 1985 Parents' Music Resource Center controversy over dirty rock lyrics. (Harvey was in radio when you couldn't use dirty words like "cancer" and "syphilis," and feared that a slippery slope would result once folks started banning a few dirty words.)

Harvey was lampooned for his staccato delivery and his . . . , . . . , . . . , long pauses (couldn't resist), along with his penchant for reading ads from his sponsors (a time-honored practice in American talk radio, actually), but he was no rabble-rouser, he was very direct and unpretentious, and he was very much the archetypal Midwesterner, and for that he will be missed.

Good day! R.I.P.