Or his total lack of either of those things, to be more precise. Here’s the transcript of a conversation Levin had with a caller on his show last week. It starts out fairly pointlessly, but not obnoxiously:
CALLER: I just wanna say, Obama is a lot smarter than you folks give him credit for. You guys were on a roll, I have to admit, with all those tea parties. Everything was rolling along, the Republicans were gaining momentum. And he managed to change your entire conversational focus. And you let those three hundred thousand people —
HOST: My God. He’s so smart. His own party voted against him on Guantanamo Bay. How stupid was that, Cindy? His own party refused to fund the closing of Guantanamo Bay.
CALLER. Yeah but you know he can just move those people over here anyway. He’s already doing it with the one guy.
And here’s where the stupidity, hypocrisy and self-righteousness begins:
HOST: Yeah, sure, he can do whatever he wants. Let me ask you a question. Why do you hate this country?
CALLER: No, I love this country.
HOST: (angrily shouting) I SAID WHY DO YOU HATE MY COUNTRY! WHY DO YOU HATE MY CONSTITUTION? WHY DO YOU HATE MY DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE?
You just said it. He can blow off Congress. He can do whatever he wants, right?
CALLER: Well, he seems to, he just moved (inaudible).
Bear in mind that Levin was a staunch supporter of the Bush administration’s policy of housing inmates at Guantanamo Bay and a staunch opponent of every court ruling that allowed those inmates to have any rights whatsoever. He supported the authority of the president to capture people and hold them forever without ever charging them with anything. Yet he goes into cries of self-righteous indignation when someone suggests that the president also has the authority, then, not to do so and to grant them trials and due process. That’s the kind of mental gymnastics that takes a real talent for cognitive dissonance to pull off.
But he didn’t stop there. To make it even worse, he decided to wrap it all up in a vile personal attack:
HOST: Answer me this, are you a married woman? Yes or no?
HOST: Well I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the hell out of here.
And this is a guy who gets to write for the National Review. My, how far that publication has fallen.