January 07, 2012 07:59 PM UTC

Annoying introduction to Tea Party radio show makes you expect to hear factual lapses

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• by: Jason Salzman

If you’re in charge of a Tea Party radio show, and the Republican establishment likes to say you don’t understand the way the world works, then you want to go heavy on the fact checking to make sure you’re actual factual, especially in the introduction to your show, which you play over and over and over.

And, of course, you want to be extra actual factual so you don’t annoy the progressive media critics who listen to your show and hear your introduction over and over and over.

Colorado’s flagship Tea Party radio show, KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado (5 – 7 p.m. weekdays, 560 AM), has an intro that includes a quote from Nevada Rep. Sharron Angle, saying:

“We have a fearful society right now. What they’re afraid of is that what we are going to be passing down to our children is not liberty and freedom, but debt and deficits.”

(Listen to the entire intro here. I don’t think you want to miss the voice of failed-canditate-past Ken Buck, who’s also featured in the Grassroots intro. What Buck says is true, at least the “ignored us” part, but do you really want a loser’s voice in your intro?)

Angle sounds sincere and all, but she’s ill-informed, because, by definition, you don’t pass government “deficits” down to your children.

You pass a debt down. The deficit resets every year. It’s a measure of current red ink in the budget cycle. True, it could be wiped out, as the good guys on Grassroots Radio Colorado like to say all the time, in any single year. But it’s our problem, not our children’s.

The debt, on the other hand, is our children’s problem, or at least it might be a problem.

This may sound like a quibble, but, like I said, a Tea Party radio show should lead off with its best thinking, and this isn’t it. Not to mention the fact that Angle and Buck aren’t the best poster children for the Tea Party brilliance.

Plus, the serious questions of “debt” and “deficit” frequently get muddled in Tea Party circles. The two words are sometimes used incorrectly with respect to the federal government, and you’ll hear, for example, that the Colorado state budget is in the red. Of course, it isn’t.

A while back, I wrote Grassroots Radio hosts Ken Clark and Jason Worley and asked if they’d dump Angle’s statement about passing deficits down to our children from their intro because it casts an air of misinformation across their show, but I never I heard back.