Chris Lowry: The day Michael D let talk show host Michael Graham off lightly by calling him a w**ker
REGULAR listeners to Newstalk may recall the on-air incident two years ago when the future President announced that Michael Graham, the hysterical American talk show host who keeps turning up on Irish radio, was a "wanker".
It was an uncharacteristically blunt outburst from Michael D but, if anything, his assessment was too polite. The most appropriate adjectives to describe Mr Graham are not fit for broadcast.
Limiting ourselves to words that are printable, the best way to describe Michael Graham is as a cancer on national radio. Fortunately, he only gets 15 minutes a week to spread his poison but it’s enough to make a lot of Irish blood boil.
If you haven’t heard him, Graham is a cut-price Rush Limbaugh – a right-wing windbag who spends his life desperately trying to annoy people. George Hook gives him a weekly slot on Newstalk so that he can irritate people here as much as he does in his native Boston.
Like Rush, he's what Americans call a "chickenhawk", ie someone who is quick to support wars but hasn't done much actual fighting himself.
Unlike Rush, though, Graham never made it to the big time. That's partly because he's a copycat but mostly because he's simply less interesting to listen to. Limbaugh comes across as genuinely unhinged
- you never know quite what he'll say next. With Graham, on the other hand, it's excruciatingly obvious that he's just trying to shock.
In fairness to him, though, he does try very hard.
On Newstalk last week, for example, he called (and I'm not making this
up) for women to send pictures of their breasts to him so that he could put them on his website. Gosh, how daring.
The fact that he contradicted himself a few days later, when he wrote a column praising a model who wouldn't do lingerie ads because they offended her Christian principles, is neither here nor there. Logic isn't important to him. Trying to attract attention is.
Another tactic is to say things that one can only assume are deliberately stupid, thus provoking sane people to text their outrage into the station (in turn boosting advertising, which is of course is the name of the game).
And of course, listeners take the bait. Last week, for example, when Graham attempted to dismiss global warming, a listener from Cork pointed out the flaw in the American's argument - his inability to distinguish between climate and weather. (Actually, though, Graham seems to know the difference when it suits him. For example, he was mysteriously silent on global warming when cherry blossom trees started blooming last November, or when temperatures in his hometown hit a record 40C last summer.)
But occasionally, all Graham's hard work pays off and he succeeds in what he has dedicated his life to doing: causing genuine offence. The most notable example was when he declared, in 2005, that "Islam is a terror organisation". Naturally, this ludicrous generalisation caused uproar. Sadly, the radio station he worked for in Washington played into his attention-seeking hands by firing him, rather than simply saying, "grow up".
But his obnoxious comments are by no means reserved for his American listeners. Shortly before Christmas, he told his Irish audience that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was "one of the most moral actions ever taken by a nation state". Yes, you read that right. Graham believes that incinerating civilians in their beds was a moral act - one of the MOST moral acts in history.
He went on to explain that the bomb "saved lives", by which of course he means American lives. Apart from the fact that the accuracy of this statement is historically questionable - even Eisenhower acknowledged that the war in Japan was effectively won by the time of Hiroshima - it misses the point completely.
Either you think that targeting civilians is morally acceptable or you do not. Graham has made it abundantly clear, through his endless scaremongering about Islamic terrorism, that he does not think it's acceptable. So why the inconsistency? If murdering 3,000 civilians on September 11 was unacceptable - and most sane people think it was - then murdering 100,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was at least as unacceptable. Eight children were killed on 9/11, which is eight too many but far fewer than the 10,000 or more who were vaporised in Hiroshima.
Interestingly, his normally jovial tone lost its faux bonhomie as he explained another reason why he was so happy about Hiroshima: the bomb saved his grandfather from being posted to Japan: "Why should my grandfather die" he ranted. You could almost see the smile freezing on his face as he realised what he was saying.
If it hadn't been for Hiroshima, little Michael might never have been born. In short, it's moral and good that a hundred thousand innocents were burnt alive - otherwise Michael's sorry ass might never have existed.
So why does George Hook, who's an ogre but a likeable one, tolerate all this? Partly it's because the controversy creates some "buzz" for his show but mostly, I think, it's because George is not a political anorak, which means that Graham - who's as nerdish as they come - can run rings round him.
Not always, though. On one occasion, Hook came to the defence of Palestinians, prompting Graham to dust off his standard line that people who criticise Israel are "anti-semitic". Hook usually indulges his guest but on this occasion he put him firmly in his place.
George, as his regular listeners know, has deeper connections with Ireland's Jewish community than virtually any other gentile in the country - lifelong connections that stretch back to his childhood in an area of Cork then called "Jew Town". He pointed this out calmly and with great dignity. Graham, for once, shut up.
The difference between the two men couldn't have been clearer. Hook, for all his faults, is a grown-up. Graham is a child.
