Blowhard Boortz

I normally enjoy reading commentary from the radio talk-show host Neal Boortz, but he occasionally comes up with something so insane that it is worth pointing out and mocking.

Down near the bottom of an otherwise quality column, he writes of the 17th Amendment, "[t]his is the tragic amendment that turned the election of U.S. senators over to the voters instead of the various state legislatures". Huh? Why is increasing the rights and powers of the people a "tragic" thing? Why would Mr. Boortz rather have corrupt state legislators hand-pick sycophantic cronies for the upper house of Congress rather than the voters?

This comment is about on par in terms of lunacy with his recent attack on the large chunk of Americans who happen to smoke. He called them, if I remember correctly, "incredibly stupid people".

Now, he certainly has a right to his opinions, same as anyone else. And being a talk-show host, he has an incentive to be as inflammatory as possible in order to get more listeners. But these two comments are nothing more than examples of idiocy. Luckily, idiocy only comprises a small minority of his points-of-view. Let's hope those numbers hold.