Can't Shut A Bad Man Up

Boston-area talk radio host Jay Severin makes Mark Levin look like Diane Rehm. So it was with great displeasure that I heard about his span>return to the airwaves< last week after a month long indefinite suspension.

The proximate cause of Severin’s latest banishment was a fusillade of intemperate remarks that he made about Mexican immigrants, whom he labeled “leeches, ” “primitives” and “criminaliens.” Hospital emergency rooms, he said, have become “essentially condos for Mexicans.” He also blamed, in the midst of the national hysteria over swine flu, our neighbors south of the Border for bringing disease into the United States. “In addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports of Mexico -- women with mustaches and VD -- now we have swine flu.”

But this was not the first time that Severin, a former political consultant to Pat Buchanan, had made disgusting comments about a whole group of people on his WTKK radio show. In a 2004 conversation with a caller about whether the United States should “befriend Muslims,” Severin retorted, "You think we should befriend them; I think we should kill them.” How’s that for a foreign policy!

Severin is also creative with the truth, particularly in regards to his resume and achievements. In 2005, he span>claimed< on-air that he had received a Pulitzer Prize for online journalism, even though there is no such Pulitzer category (Severin hasn’t won a Pulitzer for anything). Asked about the claim by the Boston Globe’s Scot Lehigh, Severin offered this lame response: “What I said was, there is a prize that my editor told me is the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Web journalism. That is a hell of a caveat.” That is a hell of a caveat, and would render whatever accomplishment he imagined for himself next to meaningless, except Severin didn’t offer it.

Severin issued the requisite apology for his latest tirade, the sort of insincere expression of regret that politicians and celebrity abusers of the law and/or basic standards of propriety seem to offer on a weekly basis in response to popular outrage over their misbehavior. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who has a monthly radio show on WTKK, span>weighed in< on the controversy, saying that while he “read and appreciated [Severin’s] apology,” “we have got to figure out a way on this station and in our broader civic life to engage even on difficult issues without demeaning people who differ from us in background or point of view.” Those are wise words from the Governor. A first step would be to start ignoring Severin and other blowhards, whatever their political leanings.