Mike Rosen must have figured I wasn’t getting enough angry e-mails and phone calls during this heated election season.
So at recent “debate” at a comedy club, the longtime KOA radio talk show host (who also writes a column for The Denver Post) announced that, yes, they should build that mosque in New York City.
“I think they should be allowed to build it, followed by the hijacking of an Iranian plane right into that building and blow it to smithereens,” Rosen said.
The crowd roared.
Then, the high-tech infrastructure of blogs and activist groups financed by left-wing millionaires roared.
Within days, Rosen was Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” on MSNBC, which prompted a few dozen calls and e-mails asking The Post — not KOA, oddly enough — to jettison Rosen.
In his column last Thursday, Rosen defended his comments as satire. What it really was, in my view, was a lame attempt at humor. A bad joke. There’s nothing funny about flying a hijacked plane into any building, anywhere.
To be honest, I cringed when I heard it. (But maybe that’s because I heard it after the fact, and was bracing myself for the calls and e-mails.)
The comedy-club debate, which also featured David Sirota of 760 AM and Peter Boyles of KHOW-630 AM, was meant as entertainment. It wasn’t much of a serious, in-depth look at the issues. They were allowed only 30 seconds to answer questions — hardly enough time for an in-depth debate. And there was a boxing bell ringside.
Boyles even elicited laughs from the crowd early on by answering several questions with a simple “yes,” without elaborating further.
But two days after the debate, Sirota, whose syndicated column The Post also runs, wrote a blog post on the left-leaning Huffington Post titled “Denver Radio Host Mike Rosen Pushes for Terrorist Attack on Islamic Center Built in Lower Manhattan.”
Really?
Less than two hours later, Media Matters for America, a liberal group promising to sniff out conservative misinformation in the media, urged its followers to e-mail their disgust to Rosen, KOA and The Denver Post. ProgressNow Colorado, a liberal activist group, quickly denounced Rosen as well.
But by the time Rosengate reached the pinnacle of progressive media — Olbermann’s show — he became “The Denver Post’s Mike Rosen” rather than KOA’s Mike Rosen.
Several callers told me they couldn’t believe we would print such drivel. Rosen’s comments were not made in The Post, nor would we have allowed him, or anyone, to make such comments in the newspaper.
Even though Rosen writes a weekly column for The Post as a freelance columnist, he’s not a full-time employee. However, because we print his columns, his words and actions do reflect on us.
If I thought for one minute that Rosen seriously “pushed” for another attack on New York City, he wouldn’t be writing for us.
But knowing Rosen, and having listened to his show for years, I knew it was his attempt at humor.
Even if everyone isn’t laughing.
Endorsements
We’ve been trotting out endorsements of candidates and issues for the past two weeks and hope to have them all wrapped up this week. For a recap, go to .
New views
We’ve added two new voices to our stable of local columnists. Mary Winter, formerly of the Rocky Mountain News who now writes for AOL’s , will be writing for us twice a month on Sundays, while former first lady and onetime Post columnist Dottie Lamm has returned for a monthly turn at the mic. Their unique voices should add to the mix of views on our op-ed pages.
Editorial page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter at .
