Andrew Stuttaford points out that despite the popular perception, there's very little about Arianna Huffington that could be properly labeled "conservative." I don't know if there's this perception of her as right wing because of her history (a bizarre one, in which she was married to a rich Republican liberal who almost beat Diane Feinstein in her first Senatorial election, and then divorced him after he came out of the closet about his sexual preference for men), that's simply hanging on from inertia, or what.

One possibility is that the press likes to have liberals who they can label as conservative, so that when the supposed "conservative" opposes some Republican position, they can say, "Gee, this must really be an egregiously neanderthal policy if even the conservative Arianna Huffington is against it..."

I was thinking about this the other day while listening to a radio program on KCRW (the LA NPR affiliate) called "Left, Right and Center." It's hosted by Matt Miller (former Clinton budget guy), with Arianna and Robert Scheer. I guess the idea was that Scheer was left (no question about that), Huffington was "right," and that Mr. Miller represented the center. It was always kind of laughable, but today it just seems ridiculously so.

In fact, to demonstrate how sinister-tilted they all are, they had David Frum on to defend the Administration's policy on affirmative action in general and the Michigan case in particular. All three sides of the supposed political spectrum proceeded to gang up on both him and the Administration (though Miller at least was willing to acknowledge that the Administration might have some merit in some of its arguments).

The show's title should be "Left, Lefter and Loony." But then, it's NPR, where they have both kinds of politics--liberal and progressive.

[Update on Tuesday morning]

N. Z. Bear informs me that I'm behind the times--Frum is now a regular, and that he is the right. OK, that still begs the question, what the heck is Arianna?

I stopped listening forever to my local NPR station, WBFO 88.7 the morning after President Bush made his address to the nation on September 20, 2001. The NPR reporters so twisted the message of the speech that I swore I never could trust them again.

Here is the text of the original speech:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html

John Kavanagh
Buffalo, NY

Texan Michael Huffington never really seemed to have the drive you'd expect in a high office politician -- the push for power always seemed to be coming from Arianna's side. Personally, I think she had hopes back in the early 1990s of using Michael to become the Republican's Hillary Clinton, advancing in political power on the coattails of her husband.

Had he been elected Senator, I have no doubt Arianna would have pushed him rather quickly into making a run for the presidency (at which time Democratic operatives would have definitely dug up the homosexual information, which would have stopped that plan dead in its tracks). When he lost, she continued to voice conservative ideas for about five years, probably in hopes that she could build up her own power base within the party. When that failed, she began looking for new paths to political influence, and found it in the pseduo-populism of the Warren Beatty types, where she could quickly move to the forefront of political commentary, even if the number of followers are about the size of a Montreal Expos crowd in September.

Arianna's desperately hunting for an issue that will take hold with the American people and give her a power base, and while she has few followers, her early 1990s positions allow the media to present her as a conservative who's seen the light, in the mode of Gary Willis, Kevin Phillips and (self-alleged) 1964 Goldwater voter Hillary Clinton.

Rand -

Actually, Frum is a regular on the show. He's the one who represents the right: Miller's standard introduction is "We have Bob Scheer on the left, David Frum on the right, I'm Matt Miller holding down the center, and of course Arianna Huffington, operating beyond these stale categories which preoccupy the male gender on this show."

I had honestly forgotten she was ever considered a conservative; she's definitely not acting like one these days.

Left Right & Center is actually a pretty consistently good show; Frum is always good, and Miller is a good host and generally holds reasonable positions, if not necessarily ones I always agree with. Scheer is an idiot, but Frum usually demolishes whatever nonsense he's spouting, so that's satisfying...

I wasn't aware of that. I hadn't heard the show in quite a while, but when it started years ago, Arianna was the "right."

The show I heard had the three of them in the studio, but Frum sounded like he was on a phone, which is why I thought it was a guest spot.

Yeah, I have no idea where Arianna is; hence, I guess, Miller's intro of her as "somewhere beyond".

KCRW actually has done quite well for itself with the show --- with Huffington's SUV crusade making news, and Frum's new book hitting the bestseller lists, they've suddenly got a panel half-full of media stars...

-NZB

Hey, how come no one calls Arianna on this SUV thing for the obvious racism it involves? The logic of her argument is, a)SUV's use lots of gas, b) gas comes from oil, c) we buy oil from Arab countries, d) Arabs are terrorists, hence SUV drivers support terrorism. Why does she get a free pass on this? Aside from the irony of someone who owns a private jet castigating the poor unwashed about their choice of vehicle, there's a large dose of ethnic stereotyping going on here.

.