I have been a fan for a long, long time, but sometimes he just makes me want to scream!

I've been listening to Dennis for a long time. I'm not even sure how long it's been. I know I caught a few of his "Religion on the Line" shows, and loved them. They reminded me of a decade-previous TV show that Steve Allen and his wife Jayne Meadows wrote and produced, "Meeting of Minds" which I enjoyed prodigiously. But since I wasn't a regular talk radio listener at the time, I didn't make it a habit.

Let me back up a bit. I was born into liberalism and grew up a good liberal. I have that in common with Dennis. Liberal family, liberal attitudes, liberal presuppositions. That's probably as far as our commonality goes, because I doubt Dennis fell for some of the garbage I did. High school and college cemented the goodness of liberalism in my mind--good people hated poverty, hated oppression, hated the inequality that nasty old exploitative system called "capitalism" brought to society. If you were good, you did what the early Christians did, gave away everything you had. St. Francis was one of my heroes.


There's a long story about how I came out of the nuttiness of liberalism. I'll probably indulge myself in commentary somewhere down the road, but for now I just want to say I never changed my attitude about anything. I still hate poverty, I still want everyone to be prosperous and happy. I still want everyone, not just in my country but around the whole world, to be prosperous and happy and free. I want the world to be color-blind, as I was when I was growing up. It wasn't till I had reached my late 20's that I realized that my best friends and I were not of the same race.

So in my late 20's I also realized it was okay to be a conservative (which is not exclusive to being a liberal as well), that my fear of admitting to seeing conservative solutions to problems as better than liberal solutions to those problems was really just a fear of wearing a label that I had been taught not to like.

Meanwhile I had started changing the radio dial away from "All Things Considered" and left-leaning talk shows, and found Rush Limbaugh on one channel in 1991 and, though I couldn't tell you how many years later, I found Dennis on another.