by Mike Mosedale

POSTED FEBRUARY 1 , 1998--
Anyone who has endured much commercial talk radio ought to be accustomed to mind-warping displays of ignorance, ill-will and flatulence. Those are, after all, the chief currencies of the medium. Still, the gas emanated by radio reactionaries on the subject of the as yet unnamed Clinton scandal - in a nod to constitutional scholar Luther Campbell, I nominate "MeSoHornyGate" - has been something special indeed.

In typical fashion, Rush Limbaugh has produced a torrent of drooling enthusiasm on the subject, mostly of the brand one might expect, say, from a cruel 15-year-old-girl giddy over the death of a rival in a traffic accident. No real surprise there. In our own Twin Cities, though, local radio personalities have excreted in such a spectacularly lame manner we cannot refrain from some comment.

Take, for instance, KSTP-AM's own flyweight curmudgeon Joe Soucheray. Sooch, as he likes to be known, fancies himself some sort of latter day Mencken. He imagines himself to be a guy immune to fashions, inoculated against the foibles of the conventional thinking. He considers himself eminently practical, a fellar whose no-nonsense "garage logic" perspective lays bare the failings of all that is wrong and misguided in the liberal canon. Unfortunately, his worshipful cadre of listeners only encourage this sorry misunderstanding.

Sooch, really, is nothing much more than a self-loathing baby boomer, a coaster who runs his bully mouth on automatic during a dead mid-afternoon radio slot and then grinds out anemic newspaper columns with the scantest of effort. These days, his prose offerings seem to be little more than a weak re-hashing of the broadcast. Sooch wasn't always this way and that's what makes his ready-for-radio, Reagancrat dronings a touch depressing. Perhaps his intellect has simply withered with the hairline. How else, for instance, can one explain his bizarrely, ill-informed we-must-hunt-wolves-or-they-will-eat-the-children-of-Brooklyn- Center newspaper column? Or perhaps it is all part of a convenient career calculation. But there is no decent explanation for Sooch's continued presence on the media scene, except perhaps the enormous momentum provided by celebrity, even the diluted variety of celebrity indigenous to the Twin Cities market.

His rambling soliloquies on the Clinton scandal, however, produced some fine examples of why it may be time for Sooch to contemplate early retirement. There was not much evidence of any coherent line of reasoning in these feeble musings. Sooch merely dissolved into a long complaint about the failings of his generation, which he thinks has suffered from a lamentable dearth of war and economic calamity. Hmmm. Does he yearn for this? Apparently. In addition, Sooch believes that boomers suffer from a grand excess of tolerance. Tolerance, in the Sooch lexicon, is a dirty word; for him, it is the bane of the culture. Clinton's randy indiscretions are somehow a direct result of this phenomenon. Ignoring the issue of tolerance as the great national curse (but, by the by, do you suppose it is tolerance that has created the horrifying racial gulf in this country?), you really have to wonder about poor Joe.

Does he honestly believe that American politicians restrained their sexual appetites prior to Clinton? Well, of course, most evidence seems to support claims that the great founder Jefferson sired children by his mulatto slave, Sally Hemmings - an act patently more offensive than telling petty lies about lewd exchanges with a willing and worldly college graduate. Warren Harding - the sort of laissez-faire president Sooch no doubt holds in the highest regard - possessed two mistresses. Grover Cleveland fathered a child out of wedlock. The reality, of course, is that the political ambition and promiscuity are often born of the same root impulse - a pathetic need for affection and adoration.

Sooch, though, prefers to encourage a more divisive interpretation of this latest presidential sex farce. He wishes to make it evidence of a generational failing. It provokes, in Sooch, a call for boomer self-flagellation.

I suppose that's okay, on a certain level. But Sooch's pathetic yearnings contain a disturbing component of fantasy. Like the extremists in the militia and patriot movements, Sooch wishes government would return to the idyllic days of citizen government, to days when there were no career politicians or bureaucrats and no one out there had unusual sexual proclivities. Problem is, those days never were.