Michael Graham Confused About Intentions of Failed Terrorist Attack

Imus doesn't think Michael Graham, the midday host at 96.9 WTKK in Boston, cares very much about him, and he may be right. But Graham did a great job of masking his contempt during an interview that covered topics as disparate as Tiger Woods's salvation, Graham's looks, Islamic terrorism, and the idea of a President Palin.

Graham, a self-described "paranoid agnostic," is very familiar with Christian theology, having attended Oral Roberts University. He was confused by Brit Hume's recent statement on Fox News Sunday that Tiger Woods would more easily attain salvation were he to convert from Buddhism to Christianity.

"It certainly worked for Mark Sanford," joked Graham, who doesn't get the Buddhist notion of reincarnation. "At some point you do hit the bottom: cockroach, amoeba, congressman. Once you reach Congressman, I don't know where you go from there."

After commenting that Graham, appearing via satellite, was better-looking than Imus recalled, Imus asked the Massachusetts resident his thoughts on Martha Coakley, the state's current Attorney General who will run for the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat.

"Here's how qualified she is to be in the Senate while we're in the midst of a war on terror," Graham began. "When they asked her about her foreign policy experience, she said, 'Well, my sister used to live in the Middle East.'"

He begged somebody, anybody, in the Obama administration to get serious about the terrorists who are trying to kill us, like the one on Christmas Day who hid explosives in his underwear to try to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit.

Having recently flown himself, Graham was irate that he couldn't bring a fingernail clipper on a plane, and yet Obama gave "the guy who tried to blow up his johnson" a lawyer.

"I don't think the goal was to blow up his johnson," Imus clarified. "I think that would have been a consequence of blowing the plane up."

Still angry, Graham told Imus about a Wall Street Journal article written by Shelby Steele, in which he posited that Obama's strategy throughout his life has been to be "not something."

"His entire presidency has been to be not George W. Bush," said Graham. "That's easy, and it's fine, but...there's no big picture here."

Obama, he added, was merely the negation of something. "There's no amount of hating Dick Cheney that will stop the next terrorist attack," Graham pointed out.

As Imus's mind began to wander, Graham posed this hypothetical: given recent actual events, would America be better off today with President Obama or President Palin?

Said Imus, "I think it's a jump ball."

-Julie Kanfer