Libertarian Mancow Wants Nanny State to Police His Diet

I sometimes wonder if trendy radio jocks who find employment on conservative talk stations don't just adopt the self-description of being "libertarian" just to safeguard their employment, while not jeopardizing their invitations to A-list, wine and brie soirees on the Gold Coast, in Evanston, and in other trendy leftist circles.

First there was Jay Marvin, the self described, bi-polar, manic depressive talker on WLS-AM a few years back. As the station got progressively more conservative in tone, he began calling himself a "libertarian," while persisting in purveying his unabashed old-line liberal claptrap.

Then there was Jerry Agar, on WLS and now WGN. He genuinely is a libertarian. In fact during his stint in North Carolina, he rubbed shoulders with some acquaintances of mine who run a genuinely libertarian think tank there.

But now there is Erich Mancow Muller, the super jock that WLS recently lured in to fill its 9 to 11 am slot.

I genuinely like Mancow. He's a breath of fresh air after the turgid old schtick of Don Wade and Roma who seem to think that a weekly 30 minute bit on wine tasting makes for good radio. (I'm sure, however, it does generate a goodly number of gratis vintage bottles for the Wade household wine cellar.)

Former disco disc spinner, Wade has a sense of humor that high school sophomores would find embarassingly unsophisticated. Any day now I expect to hear him start laughing uproariously at his own booger and fart jokes. And if I hear Roma's grating voice touting the wonders of "Healthy Trinity" stomach bugs one more time, I think I'll stick a fork through my ear.

So Mancow is exciting by comparison -- even despite having to endure the burden of a woefully miscast, overpaid, news reader sidekick -- Pat Cassidy. Cassidy is at best dead weight to the show, but all too frequently, he begins to fancy himself a serious journalist, id est, liberal journalist and has the effect of stepping on Mancow's lines, creating unneeded tension and basically, upsetting the timing and throwing a wet blanket over the entire production.

But anyway, Mancow calls himself a libertarian.

And in truth, he usually seems pretty true to libertarian ideals. He spoke at the Chicago Tea Party tax protest and afterwards lashed into his on-air guest, Leftist Congressthing, Jan Schakowsky in a way that she has probably never experienced in her life. He actually had you cheering him on.

But yesterday, Mancow interviewed one of those pecksniffity women from the Ralph Nader nutritional group, that every six months or so, crawls out of the Beltway muck to propose some new limitation on our liberty.

This month they're advocating requirements that restaurant chains print complete nutritional information for every dish served.

Aside from the fact that this would cost restaurants a bundle -- likely necessitate an increase in costs to the consumer and probably necessitate the layoffs of some of their illegal alien busboys and cooks -- it is clearly a step down the Naderite road of prohibiting certain food choices.

But "libertarian" Mancow thought this was just great.

Apparently suffering from something of a burgeoning lard butt (perhaps osmotically contracted from daily proximity to Cassidy) and a passion for fast food, he said the government should regulate what he eats, to protect him from himself.

This prompted a regional Libertarian Party spokeswoman to call in and tell Mancow that real libertarians don't plead for government protection and care.

Maybe next, Mancow will want OSHA to come in to the WLS studios and put safety bars around his desk.

He would certainly want to be safeguarded by his government nanny protectors, should he somnalescently fall off his stool while listening to Roma's interminably turgid "Healthy Trinity," commercials.