Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Evansville doesn't get the attention it deserves. It's a fairly isolated area, 100 miles from any other major Hoosier population center.

On the other hand, it was a glorious fall morning to drive I-64. The leaves are just hitting the fall peak. The southern Indiana hills just gave miles of vistas of beautiful orange, red, yellow, green and rich brown visions.

I even had good luck with Mapquest. It took me right where I needed to go. I seem to have done better going by the written directions rather than by their maps.

The Channel 14 WFIE studio is built on top of a big hill. The entrance is in the back, which leaves the lucky receptionist for the station with huge windows opening out onto a view for miles of hills and trees and city below. Again, I'm getting it here just at the peak of season. Impressive.

I appeared live on the midday newscast with reporter Ben Jackey from 11:45 am till noon. Turned out to be a call in show, which I'd never done before. The main topic of interest in Evansville seems to be Iraq and foreign policy.

One caller denounced me as a dirty "neocon" and as "two-faced" for supporting the war, as he supposed this to be contradictory to my generally espoused beliefs of disliking taxes and activist government. Yes, I confess to not being fond of the government doing lots of stuff it shouldn't be doing, which is most of it. Dealing with nasty, violent enemies such as the Ba'athists is the main reason for having a federal government, though. This does not seem contradictory to me.

Also, I'm still looking for someone who can tell me the definition of "neocon," by the way. Could somebody complete this sentence stem for me? A neo-con is someone who believes...

This same caller was also agitated that I would support the Iraq war on the supposed grounds that Hussein had nothing to do with terrorism. Now, we have found only a few minor scraps of WMDs- and I don't know whether to be relieved or worried by that. Also, Saddam's ties specifically to al Qaeda are somewhat weak. He very likely didn't have anything to do specifically with 9/11. But then, no one says he did.