Joshy Omnimedia

On Thursday I taped a segment about the well-spun Oil-for-Food program on FAIR's excellent radio show, "Counterspin."

You can find one of the 125 non-commercial stations that carries the program here, or you can download an MP3 or stream the show here.

I figured I'd take the opportunity to recount the time that I became the only liberal ever to have his ass kicked on Air America Radio. This is reposted from The Gadflyer:

Talk-radio is usually a lot of fun, but I've been meaning to write about the time it wasn't--the time I got my ass kicked on Air America Radio, of all places, proving further that electronic media doesn't allow you to edit and can be downright scary even for the chattiest of us.

I was invited on after I wrote here about an embarrassing moment for Project 21-- a black conservative group run by white conservatives--on C-Span. The (black) guy they sent, you may recall, caught a flat tire and the group's pasty-faced Reagan-era director showed up instead and gamely gave a "black conservative" critique of then NAACP president Kweisi Mfume.

So I get a call from Air America Radio, back when Chuck D and Lizz Winstead had their morning show, asking me to come on the next day with Mychal Massie, the frothing right-winger whose flat tire got the story started.

Massie's one of those WorldNetDaily nutjobs. His articles run the gammit, from slamming the Red Cross for its pesky insistence on conforming to the Geneva Conventions to his classic "Peaceful religion is not spelled I-s-l-a-m."

They tell me I'll get about five minutes, and then they'll go to Massie. Fine. The day comes, and I'm put on hold to listen to the show while I await my prompt. Then about a minute before I go on an intern type gets on the phone and says, 'they think it would be better if you two went head to head.'

My first mistake that morning was saying, 'Er, OK.' I wasn't thinking that quickly; this was before seven on the West Coast.

A minute later there were all of these weird buzzing and clicking noises, and then I'm on (but I can't hear my own voice). Chuck D asks me a question, and I said something---I don't remember what--and then I got in my only passable line of the show: 'Americans,' I said, 'are getting tired of phony politics.' Profound, no?

At that point, they went to Massie, who launched into full-on O'Reilly mode. He started talking and he just kept talking and talking and getting louder and louder and the hosts couldn't break in and I couldn't get in a word and it was just a horrible three minutes.

He kept calling me "the young man" with this really condescending tone and then he went and called me a racist! A liberal, soft racist, don't you know (some of my best friends are black!).

At one point, I've been told, I could be heard in the background asking, "um… am I still on?"

After a while the hosts cut off both of our mikes--as if we were both screaming unintelligibly-- and I thought, 'that was a swift and ignominious end to my career in punditry.'

My remaining 14 minutes of fame would be as 'That Liberal Who Got Slammed on Air America Radio.' Suddenly, I knew Colmes' pain.

But apparently I got another shot, and I learned a good lesson that day: if you go up against a backlash maniac, insist that there's a trainer there to dart him if need be, or at least turn his mike off once in a while and let you get in a point edgewise.