INTRODUCTION

You hold in your hands a book by a radio talk-show host.

How special.

What can I possibly say that you haven’t thought a thousand times already?

Well, something, I hope. After all, it’s my job to come up with things to say—things to get people talking. If you’re like most people, on the other hand, you probably spend most of your time every day watching what you say, for fear that blurting out your insensitive thoughts might bring about adverse repercussions, whether at home, at work, or in your social life.

After all…everybody has to get along. Right?

Nope—not me!

You see, I’m one of the rare people you know who has a job perfectly matched to his personality type. It appears that I somehow failed to develop the convenient social skill of keeping my yap shut. Even before I knew I had a mind, I had a penchant for speaking it. And I’ve been developing my skills in that department ever since.

Of course, in a lot of ways, we’re alike, you and I. When you wake up in the morning and listen to the news or read a newspaper, you probably think, What in the hell are these people thinking? The only difference is, you then cruise off to work and make a studied effort to keep your ill-tempered thoughts to yourself for the rest of the day. When I wake up, hear those same news reports, and think the same thing—What in the hell are these idiots thinking?—I’m lucky enough to be able to do something about it. Right away I’m making plans to rip them a variety of new ones as soon as I get to work. I don’t have to worry about the consequences of having opinions. For me, it’s part of the job description.

Such is the life of a radio talk-show host.

I am, it is said, an equal opportunity offender. If I come to the end of my four daily hours on the air and I’m not sure I have gravely offended at least one group—social, racial, socio-economic, ethnic, political, generational, regional—then I consider my work that day an abject failure.

I begin each show with a simple basic truth running through my mind. “These people out there doing these dangerous, stupid, sometimes hilarious, and often strange things have no right not to be offended, and I’m here to see that these non-rights are recognized and respected.”

There are no taboos on my show. Race, gender, religion, national origin, political persuasion…it’s all fair game. No political correctness here.

People may be able to hide their illogical, sometimes downright moronic behavior behind the shield of a convenient group identity in their everyday lives. But not from me.

There’s only one real requirement for someone to land in my crosshairs: that you do something, either intentionally or through ignorance, that will contribute to the destruction of the greatest experiment in self-government this world has ever known—our country, the United States of America.

Many of my diatribes, of course, are aimed at liberals. These people actually think that America is great because of government. Such easy targets.

But they’re not the only ones. Theo-cons, for instance. Religious faith is fine, even admirable. But when you decide that your ideas on religion are so indisputably correct that everyone ought to live by them, it’s time for a little talking to.

The earth is only six thousand years old? Just spare me.

Then there are the suburban soccer moms blissfully driving their urban assault vehicles adorned with those “My child is an honor student” bumper stickers to the repair shop to get the tires rotated on their riding vacuum cleaners. Someone needs to have a serious talk with these women about the wisdom of turning their children over to the government to be educated, and since nobody else seems to be stepping up to the plate, I’m happy to do it.

(And what’s this fascination with soccer anyway? Are these over-protective parents afraid to let their precious little cutest-child-in-the-entire-world play a game where they might get hit, or where someone might throw something at them?)

Not to mention the men who are afraid to venture out of their homes for fear that they might actually come face-to-face with (gasp!) “one of them homo-sexual guys” out on the street someday. I mean, really.

And I’m just getting warmed up. In the pages that follow, you’ll encounter:

And that just scratches the surface. The life of a no-holds-barred talk show host is richly rewarding—thanks to the listeners, callers, columnists, editorialists, and just ordinary red-blooded Americans who make it so.

While writing this book, it occurred to me that I may have been blessed to grow up and to spend most of my life during the best of America’s years. As much as I love this country, it’s certainly hard to be optimistic about her future.

We’ve become a nation of people who care little for their freedom and who’ve grown completely dependent on their government. We stand ready to trade away almost all of our precious liberties in exchange for a slender slice of security, courtesy of the federal government.

I’ve been around long enough that I’ll probably weather any foreseeable disaster our power-hungry political class and our complacent, dependent voters might visit upon us. The generations that follow won’t be quite so fortunate.

Just look around you! Open a newspaper for once. They don’t hurt, you know. Try reading something other than People, Sports Illustrated, or Cosmo. Flip the channel to something besides Extra or Entertainment Tonight.

Things aren’t going all that well, folks, and if we don’t wake up and smell the tyranny, our children and grandchildren will grow up robbed of their individual identity, marching in lockstep with their fellow poorly educated, complacent, government-dependent friends, toward that great socialist Valhalla dreamed of by the great thinkers of the political left.

The hardest thing about writing this book was deciding when to stop. Since I finished the main text (I wrote this introduction last) we’ve:
  • Seen a government school have a twelve-year-old special education student arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for wetting her pants;
  • Learned that the Mexican government is providing GPS devices to Mexican citizens to help them avoid American law enforcement as they illegally cross our border to become part of the Mexican invasion force;
  • Found out that George W. Bush wants broad new powers to open our mail just to see what we’re sending to each other;
  • Discovered that police in Paris, France, have determined that preparing soup with pork for feeding to the homeless is a racist act because a homeless person who might want to eat some of that soup just might be a Muslim;
  • Watched Barack Obamamania sweep the country, focused on a man with no compelling political experience and no real agenda to speak of;
  • Learned that the Bush administration has negotiated an agreement with Mexico that would allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits in this country without working and paying Social Security taxes nearly as long as any American citizen would have to;
  • Discussed whether or not Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to serve in Congress, will emulate his peers by trying to bring the pork back to his home district.

And that’s just two days’ worth of news!

I began my career in talk radio in September 1969. (You see, there was this suddenly dead talk show host…but we’ll get to that later.) I was a quintessential grade school wimp and high school dork who defied the odds and turned a completely unpromising and lackluster childhood, coupled with a less-than impressive effort at education, into a career as one of radio’s longest-running talk show hosts.

And how did I pull that off? Simple—by getting on the radio day after day after day and saying things that most people are afraid to say out of fear of losing their jobs or becoming social lepers.

The modern era of political correctness1 has clamped the tongues of many. But the emergence of talk radio removed those clamps, actually giving people a public forum to speak their minds—to the utter horror of the PC crowd.

One thing I’ve been rather proud of during my talk radio career is the number of conservatives who complain that I’m too liberal, and the number of liberals who say I’m too far to the right. The poor libertarians? They think I don’t know where the hell I stand.

This book will tackle some of the issues and ideas that have been the focus of some very interesting talk radio conversations over the years: from poverty to prayer in the schools, from race relations to religion, from abortion to gun control, from the United Nations to the war in Iraq, and from the “gay agenda” to the war against Islamic terrorism. Some of the stories are lighthearted, presented here more for your amusement than anything else. Others are here merely for their gee-whiz factor. Still others will be included to give you pause, to make you double back to your strongest opinions, ask some questions, and perhaps—just perhaps—rethink your unexamined convictions.

One last thought.

As I looked through the final draft of Somebody’s Gotta Say It, I wondered just what sentence, what passage the bed-wetting left was going to seize on to demonize me. There are plenty of candidates. They won’t like my feelings on the poor, poor pitiful people who seem incapable of earning above the minimum wage, or my thoughts about the one group of beloved Americans who, in my opinion, present a greater long-range threat to America than Islamic fascists.

Some of my ideas will irritate the left, no doubt about it. They’ll try to fight back. But they’ll never be able to refute them with any degree of fact or logic. So, instead, they’ll respond the same way they’ve done for years: They’ll pull out ye olde “hate speech” complaint. Remember, if you should hear or read that Somebody’s Gotta Say It is just another hate-filled screed from some right-winger, what you’re really hearing is they hate the fact that crying “hate speech” is the best response they can muster.

Come on, guys. Is that the best you can do?

I know it must be hard not to control the conversational agenda.

Well, you can always write a book. Who knows? Someone might actually buy it!

As they say…somebody’s gotta say it.