B. U. G. S.

Richard was talking about he would like to make comments, but he was often worried about getting his spelling and his grammar right.

Let me tell you a little story.

When I was doing press conferences for coal miners and Boston Southies and Louisville electrical workers and farmer’s strikes and stopped up the whole city of Washington with Independent Truckers, I was all they had.

Try to understand our position: We didn’t HAVE anybody but me. On one side was the entire journalistic and educational establishment.

Conservatives denied having anything to do with these anti-busing Southies, these wildcatting coal miners. To keep their place in the spotlight, to make their livings, respectables had to stay away from these “ignorant fanatical Catholics and backwoods fundamentalists.”

I was ALL they had.

I was country when country DEFINITELY wasn’t cool.

I am the single biggest reason why country in politics IS cool.

But back then there was only one person who called them up and said, “We have a professional journalist, a legal secretary and a professional political writer. We’re providing anything you need free. We’ll be where you need us to be. What do YOU, repeat YOU, want?”

The professional political writer was me. It was far more a matter of guts than credentials. I had written a big political book with a Foreword by the publisher of National Review. I was published in National Review. My book had been recommended for purchase by the Library Journal.

Publisher’s Weekly gave me rave reviews, so did Kirkus, so did the New York Times Review of Books.

All that sounded great, and I was right out there on the streets and in the fight.

I was a former professor. But a total rebel like me had no credentials to compare with anybody in the media or even the conservative elite.

But I was ready to tie up the whole city of Washington in a traffic jam. I was willing to knock a cop out cold who was beating women in a march in Louisville. The only reason I wasn’t officially arrested was because I would have held a press conference that would have embarrassed the Louisville police to death.

Back to the basic point: I was ALL we had. So we inflated my credentials to the sky. If you read what we wrote about this spokesman Robert Whitaker, you would think I had turned down a dozen Nobel Prizes because I was too brilliant to bother.

I was ALL we had, so we made me big stuff.

The problem is that some of our own people believed our propaganda.

Think about that a minute and then you will understand the experience I want to tell you about.

I was talking to an old hard-nosed coal miner who was a fighting leader in the battle against filthy textbooks in Kanawha County, West Virginia. He was trying to talk to me, but he had heard all of OUR propaganda about me. He couldn’t talk because he worried he would use bad grammar and sound ignorant.

It was HORRIBLY frustrating for me! I wanted to hear what he had to say. He was having a case of stage fright with this galvanized god we called Bob Whitaker we had created to deal with the other side.

This man was a hero. The last time I saw him afterwards we were taking him to get his hand fixed after he had thrown his fist out of joint knocking the hell out of a guy who had crossed his picket line.

This man had saved lives down in the mines.

The FBI tried to frame this man when somebody set off a bomb to knock in a school door one Sunday — I assume FBI plants had done this harmless thing. When the FBI picked him up for it, he laughed. He told them:

“I’ve been dealing with high explosives in mines all my life. If I had set off that much explosive, the hill that school was standing on wouldn’t be there, much less the school.”

He was a better man than I will ever be. He was what I lived to represent.

This was the man who was worried about his GRAMMAR talking to this demigod we had created against our enemies named Bob Whitaker.

I was looking him straight in the eye as he struggled trying to talk to me. I was thinking, “Don’t be a fool.” The whole point of pumping me up was so I could represent YOU. YOU are what I am about. I’m smarter than THEY are, and I can take that whole crowd on for YOU. To them, I am a guy who was taught by two Nobel-Prize-winning economists. To you I’m Bob from Pontiac, South Carolina.”

I was begging him to TALK to me.

Damn it, gang, TALK to me.

There is not a modest bone in my body. I AM a genius. I was born with one hell of a brain, and I scare our enemies because I am so smart I can laugh them to shame. I am at so high a level that a PhD or a big-time news anchor doesn’t mean a thing to me.

When I attacked William Buckley he was afraid to face me.

I’m GOOD.

I am one hell of a weapon for you.

The greatest compliments I have received were these:

1) At a joint march between West Virginia textbook protestors and Boston and Louisville anti-bussers I had organized, where thousands of working people came to Washington at their own expense, a West Virginia coal miner was talking to the Boston crowd. He was wondering why the Boston crowd had such a big fight about who would be their representative at the joint press conference I had arranged. As I walked up, I heard him say:

“Whitaker speaks for us, and he’s not even a hick.”

Coal miners don’t just say, “He speaks for us.” If you are from outside their territory, West Virginians don’t trust you, much less say you speak for them.

That made the whole thing worthwhile.

I am the only Honorary Boston Southie you will ever meet. Southie is NOT a trusting place. But he used my name because it carried a lot of weight in Southie.

He hadn’t seen me walking up. I LOVED that.

I am so smart I don’t have to take those guys with the credentials seriously. Give me a chance to face them and I’ll make them look like the fools they are. Not one of them is about to face me.

I scare Alan Colmes to death. I scare Hannity to death. I’ve talked to them both.

Bill O’Reilly is a moron compared to me. You can use me to take our enemies or our wimps apart and they KNOW it.

I take YOU seriously.

I was a professional interrogator. I will figure out what you are telling me.

I’m REAL smart, remember?

I am also 63 years old. I will not do you any good if you don’t TALK to me.

Dammit, gang, TALK to me!