I am actually a little bit surprised that I haven’t seen two or three contrarian-wise eulogies to Paul Harvey — not fuzzy and warm memories but with some acid commentary that Paul Harvey was a bit of a cancer on our national discourse.

I’m pretty sure you could line up comments through the years that if spoken by a different figure would have, say, media matters compiling a long almost daily list.  Paul Harvey wasn’t apolitical, but he was non or a-partisan, and attach that with his non-threatening homesy delivery and his having long pre-dated the “Rise of Conservative Talk Radio” with Rush, and he pretty well flew under the radar for your “Liberal Watch Dog”s.  Also, his politics was basically regarded as having a sort of “Get off My Lawn!”  inconsequential tone.  So, looking at Media Matters, your “Paul Harvey” list seems to start and stop here.

This is why over the past few years, it has been a bit jarring to see anytime liberal blogosphere grabbed a hold of some Paul Harvey comments, in the same way they do on a more regular basis for Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh.  It’s happened a few times, and my sense is that these moments have added up and are the reason that Thom Hartmann says that “Paul Harvey became increasingly right-wing in the last five/ten/fifteen years” — a statement that is patently false and seems based on that brief compilation of material against a warm and fuzzy understanding of the man.  Reading “The Farther Shores of Politics”, published in 1968, I note that Paul Harvey’s commentary seemed to provide some easy material to fill out various long-gone publications which were full of anti-communism hysteria and John Birchite anti-fluoridation campaign material.  (And he popped into Reader’s Digests — a magazine that actually was probably roughly the equivalent of a a Paul Harvey News Hour.)  The bit of commentary (plucked from the radio, I’m thinking) was of that type of “Good old common sensical” diatribe against evils of taxes or trade unions and that sort of thing.

There is this Paul Harvey affectation that I like and that I have tucked away for use in conversing:  the phrase “For what it is worth.”  But the thing about “for what it is worth” is that whenever Paul Harvey (or his son) used it, what followed was almost certainly a lie or untruth, an urban legend tailor-made from and for the biases of the parochial-minded elder-tilting listenership.  When I referenced Paul Harvey as being a name inserted into email chain messages a few days’ ago, it occured to me that Paul Harvey is actually a pre-Internet pioneer of the Email Chain Message.  Fact checking that type of thing would be a pain for those media-matters types, so I guess that is just as well.  FAIR picked up a few, as well noted this bit of commentary.  (And “This bit of commentary” probably was more plentiful than anyone would care to note.)   The response at the end of the first FAIR link shows the precariousness of that situation:  “Paul Harvey don’t care.”

Well, as they say, GOOD DAY!

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