Howard Stern is a good interviewer.

Say about him what you will, but the guy really knows how to get stuff out of people.

I've been downloading (through those YouTube-to-mp3 websites, which are real slick) a bunch of hour-ish-long Howard Stern interviews. A lot of his subjects are people in showbiz, as you might imagine, but he really does a good job at colouring-in a person that you thought might've been pretty blank.

Take Jerry Springer, for example. What do you know about from? Probably that he hosts the Jerry Springer Show, and with good reason; it's been on forever.

I also remember him in a small role in an episode of Married... with Children playing the host of a talk show called The Masculine Feminist, wherein he gleefully bashes men. Naturally, Al Bundy's men's club, "NO MA'AM" (an acronym for "the National Organization of Men Against Amazonian Masterhood") takes over a taping of the show and starts making ridiculous demands, and brings on guests such as a "Miss Bubbles Double-D," who was currently featured at their favourite gentlemen's club, The Jiggly Room. And yes, I recalled all this from memory, and no, I haven't seen that episode in twenty years. But, remembering my own current students' names? That's a tough one.

Here's a still from that episode; Springer's the one who's tied up.

Anyway, Springer's an interesting guy. He grew up in Queens, all of his grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, was briefly the mayor of Cincinnati, was a TV news anchor for a decade, then started the show for which he's most famous in the early '90s; it was outrageous and controversial then, and one could argue it's "merely controversial" now. But, he's a thoughtful, smart guy and, judging from the interview, doesn't feel terribly proud that he does the show named after him. ("I wouldn't watch it," he admits, "but then again I'm not really in the target demographic.")

He's also a pretty liberal guy, and he shed an interesting perspective on why liberal radio talk-shows don't do well.

* * * * *

Robin: Didn't you do a radio show for a while?

Jerry: I did, for two years, I had my own show. Air America [a defunct left-leaning radio network] picked it up; I didn't work for Air America, but Air America carried my show for two years. I loved it.

Howard: How come liberal talk shows never do well?

Jerry: Because the liberals won.

Howard: [pauses] Do you think, is that it?

Robin: Well, the conservatives were doing well under...

Jerry: Because they're on the outs.

Robin: They were doing well under the Bush administration, they didn't go away.

Jerry: But it doesn't matter who's president; in America, the liberals won. In all the protests in the 1960s, the protests were on the left because America was conservative. We have conservative politicians, we give conservative speeches, but on every major issue, the liberals have won. We are a liberal country. You can go into the most conservative neighbourhood in America, and you go into their home and talk to their kids, and their kids listen to the same music, talk the same way, dress the same way [as liberals]; culturally, we're liberals. I did a show, the first year of the Jerry Springer Show, in Cincinnati, we did a show on interracial marriage. And there were protesters outside the studio. Twenty years later we have a president who's the product of an interracial marriage. The liberals won, on every issue, on every issue. So therefore, the real energy of the protest movement -- think about it, whether it's the gun lobby, the right-to-life movement -- all the protests now, which is where talk radio gets its oomph from, is on the right.

Howard: So you're saying liberals won everything...

Jerry: We've won! And we don't know how to say, "Hey!"

Robin: So what's with this red-state, blue-state thing, then?

Jerry: We feel obliged often, even liberals do, or even Obama feels obliged, because somehow you seem more "adult" if you give a conservative speech. [in a low voice] "Well, we're gonna be..."

Howard: Maybe you're right, I never looked at it that way.

Jerry: We live liberally, all of us do.

* * * * *

He's right, you know. Even with conservatives in charge of the US for a while, and in Canada the past while (get out there and vote next year, you lazy lefty fucks!), think about all the crazy liberal shit we've gotten done.

• same-sex marriage
• pot legalization/decriminalization in places
• sort-of health-care-for-everyone in the US
• ended some long-ass wars
• kept abortion legal (although in places it's not terribly accessible)
• almost-kinda reformed prostitution laws in Canada
• and probably a lot of other stuff I've forgotten

Granted, there's a lot of stuff that hasn't gone well...

• corporations (especially financial institutions) run the US*
• organized labour's power is being eroded, e.g. "right to work"
• guns are still a pretty big deal, despite frequent mass shootings
• the HarperCons are generally evil SOBs (vote in '15 to change this!)

But yeah, so much stuff that conservatives hate is either (a.) now totes cool, or (b.) still around, and it just totally pisses them off, and then they call up assholes like Rush Limbaugh and Ezra Levant** and do their little rant-y business, then they hang up and go rub one off to exceptionally-deviant pornography or whatever it is they do.

And I'm fine with that. I really am.
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* and they're run by Jewwwws, obvy.
** the joke here is that nobody fucking watches Sun News, har har