So Long, Alan

This clip is fascinating by itself, as it confirms most of the encounters I've had with not only Obama supporters, but also with liberals for the past 20 years. But besides that, it was significant to watch the performance after learning a few days ago that Alan would be exiting Hannity And Colmes in a month or so.

I am not looking at Alan from only his television incarnation of the past 12 years, but from his earlier days of radio syndication from 20 years ago. He is and was a sharp wit on the air, which helped him keep the pacing going throughout his show. "Good radio" we would say.

I remember his usage of a show-ender segment called "radio graffiti", where the call bank was dumped, line by line, with each caller getting only 5 seconds to make their statement, their 'graffiti on the walls', so to speak. That was 20 years ago. In fact, Sean encorporated the same bit in his radio show only after it had been made famous by Alan many years before.

I am a fan of Alan Colmes from a radio professional's perspective, and that includes his punchy, off-putting questions used when he didn't have anything else along the idea of substance and logic to draw from. It worked on radio, because he could always rely on a caller when his own bank was dry, then rail on something else in an incendiary manner. Great radio.

But as we can see, Alan, without his radio props, always comes across as mean-spirited, vengeful, and devoid of substantive questions.

As Alan performs, here, it is obvious that his style wouldn't allow him to take a more holistic angle from which to question Zeigler, but instead goes immediately to the reactionary response of, "Well, so are you", and then "You're calling us bad names". Alan has to make his 2 minutes with the subject, Zeigler, seem a breathless flurry of attacks from what is really fluff.

Sad waste of anything, like, for instance, what a calm, reasoned, more clinical conversation might have allowed. Instead, we are treated to the mud-slinging it usually reduces to, adding nothing to the conversation from the left, other than the sentiment, "You called us stupid".

This is usually the same flacid, inconsequential argument most things of depth and substance break down to when dealing with liberals. Alan just happened to be a little more entertaining about it.