Alan Colmes Probably Should Have Stayed Home

Let it be known throughout the fashion world that on Janury 4, 2011, Don Imus declared that nobody should wear pinstriped suits, ever. That includes Alan Colmes, who was swiftly admonished for his poor fashion sense.
 
“Well, thanks for having me,” Colmes, a Fox News contributor and nationally syndicated radio host, replied. “It’s so great to be here!”
 
And it would only get better for Colmes, the second communist of the day to appear with Imus after Tom Friedman, who is working on a book that proposes education as the solution to fix America’s ills. Though it is a long-term goal, Friedman insisted to Imus no short-term resolution exists.
 
“You’ve got a bunch of people who want quick fixes, and they’re responding to an American public that is angry with everybody, and they want constant change,” Colmes said, obviously agreeing with Friedman. “They didn’t like the Republicans, they put in Obama. They didn’t like what the Democrats were doing, they put in more Republicans to go back to what they were doing during Bush. I don’t think it’s going to work.”
 
As for what would work, Colmes had some ideas. “Not being so afraid of raising taxes on the rich; getting out of these wars; stop paying a million dollars a soldier a year in Afghanistan,” he said. American foreign policy was, he believes, “ruined” by the reaction to 9/11, and he strongly disagreed with President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troop to Afghanistan last year.
 
Told that he was “stunningly, 100 percent right,” Colmes went into a state of shock so severe that he saw fit to do what he always does and blame George W. Bush for all of Obama’s woes.
 
“They wanted Obama, within six months, to solve every problem he inherited, and he couldn’t do it, and that’s why they turned on him,” he said of the electorate, and its short attention span. Accused of being a hater who only wants to blame Republicans, Colmes sassily said, “I don’t want to only blame them, but why are they blameless?”
 
Former Republican Congressman John LeBoutillier, also a guest with Imus earlier this morning, had stated his naïve belief that none of the new Tea Party members of Congress would be co-opted by lobbyists upon arriving at Capitol Hill. Colmes insisted the Tea Party is “a passing fad,” and that “the establishment” still runs the show in Washington.
 
But recent events indicate that maybe the media run the show, at least a little bit. Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, used his program as a platform from which to pressure Republicans to pass a health care bill for 9/11 first responders, and Fox News Anchor Shep Smith then Stewart on the air for his efforts, a move Imus believes was the ultimate impetuous for the legislation’s passage.
 
He wondered why such gutsy calls to action are left to the likes of Stewart and Smith, but Colmes had no real answer, and was equally evasive when Imus asked how much worse off the U.S. would be today under President Sarah Palin.
 
“I don’t think she’s got the ability to run anything,” Colmes said, and stressed his belief that Obama, in fact, is “doing a great job!”
 
Said the man in pinstripes.
 
-Julie Kanfer