Hannity declined to fire back, but conservative talk-show types haven't been shy about baiting each other. Recently, when Scarborough called Bush's first debate performance "disgraceful," Laura Ingraham, among others, blasted him on her program, Scarborough said (proudly).
"They'll be smart to turn on themselves and talk about which conservatives are the 'true' conservatives," says Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a trade magazine about the talk-show business. "If they keep beating up liberals, it will ring hollow over time. People realize this isn't 1993 speaking, it's almost 2005."
If right-wing talk blossomed the more it tilted against Democratic power, then perhaps the conditions are right for a liberal counter-reformation. That is certainly the fondest hope of the people behind Air America, the liberal talk network that went on the air seven months ago.
"You could argue that the best thing for us was the reelection of George Bush," says Air America's biggest star, humorist Al Franken. "The country may be swirling down the toilet, but it's given us great stuff to talk about."
Such as a program last week that included a discussion of the nomination for attorney general of Alberto Gonzales (whom Franken refers to as "Mr. Torture Memo") and an interview with a woman left widowed by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, who was critical of the federal 9/11 commission.
Franken, author of the best-selling "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot," also occasionally "attacks the attackers" in right-wing talk radio. On a recent program, he went after Limbaugh for making allegedly inaccurate statements about the minimum wage.
"We do bash the other side, but we don't want to be a mirror image of Rush," says Franken, who does an uncanny Limbaugh impersonation. "We try to inform as well as entertain." On the minimum wage issue "we got our information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rush got his from the Bureau of Rush's Butt."
After a rocky start, Air America is now carried on stations in 39 cities (but none in the Washington area), and is reaching about 40 percent of the nation. That's not exactly Limbaugh-like (he's on 580 stations, WMAL-AM locally), but it's still something to talk about.
