Sometimes my boiling point is real low. Like... same temperature to optimally chill American beer. Not Antarctic low, but not body heat, either. Low... ok? In those moments, it doesn't take much to get my Pampers all in a bunch.

So now I'm hot, since my dreary drive-time up the 101 has been ruined - ruined - by some jackass named Roger Hedgecock, yapping away the afternoon on what had been my favorite all-news radio station.

First clue he's broadcast nationwide came with his references to "out in California" - like we're on the far side of sun out here, living on a urine/ammonia diet, with eight tentacles and a deep hankering to stick long pins in whimpering earthlings. "Well, I'm sure you folks out in California can understand blah, blah, blah..." Why is this type of geographical patronization so exclusive to the East Coast? Know what? West of the Mississippi, we can slip on socks without adult supervision and even wipe ourselves after a dump!

But here's the gag: If you click on the link to his website (atop every page is Hedgecock's smiling, supremely arrogant pose) you'll discover he's a former mayor of San Diego - and evidently still resides in Jarhead Central. So all this "ah... yes... Californians... I've a few pinned to styrofoam in my bug collection" is just a cheap ruse to get cozy with all you pump-handle rubes out Adirondack way.

Hedgecock is kind of a junior-league Limbaugh, wrangling to panic-level the confused and scared out there in vast America. The blogs on his site vary from a useful link to a Money magazine article about Bush's dishonesty on the health of banks last year to bacon-drippings from Orly Taitz. This hot and cold, up and down texture mirrors the anger and sporadic insight of the riled populace "out here".

So, it's Hedgecock's mission to shape this zeitgeist, to sculpt it into a form amenable to right-wing invidiousness. One of the first things I notice about his callers is that many of them aren't poisoned on Obama. Most actually believe the President is trying to do the right thing, a good job, with an enormous pile of problems set before him. Each one, in turn, has these naive delusions smashed by Hedgecock's almost rote recitation of the teabagger playbook: Obama is incompetent, he knows nothing about foreign policy and so overseas heavyweights play him like a cello, he's an academic, he's out of touch with "middle America". Underneath it all, truly, is Right radio's soft racism: Obama is not one of us.

Evidently, Hedgecock is one of us, especially if our life-paths have swerved damn close to pastoral, white-collar lockups. Here's an excerpt from his Wikipedia entry:

In 1985 he was forced from office, after a retrial convicted him (later overturned on a technicalilty) on one count of conspiracy and twelve counts of perjury involving, then-District Attorney Ed Miller asserted, improper campaign contributions; his first trial had ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury. Hedgecock was alleged to have illegally failed to report over $350,000 in contributions from former Del Mar mayor Nancy Hoover, confidence man Jerry David Dominelli, and the last's eponymous J. David Company. (The J. David Company later imploded, after bilking investors of more than $82,000,000, in what at the time was one of the largest Ponzi schemes in the nation's history. Dominelli would later serve twenty years in Federal prison.)

His on-air promo mentions his views are seasoned with a "sprinking of pachouli oil", and here's some background on that:

In his early years, entrepreneur Hedgecock tried his hand at music concert promotions. One notable co-production of his was the 1969 Mother's Day concert at Aztec Bowl (now the site of Viejas_Arena, SDSU). Performers included Canned Heat, Grateful Dead, and Santana. In the naive months before the infamous Altamont_Free_Concert, security was provided by the local Hells Angels motorcycle club, to whom Hedgecock paid a signing bonus of a case of Jack Daniel's.

Wow - send the bikers to Iran! Well... it's a colorful past, although Hedgecock's own foreign policy and military expertise must be leavened with a draft deferment from the Vietnam War for severe acne - but he's a California attorney, so professional arrogance probably informs him he's possessed of world-class worldview. Downside, upside.

His show is part of the Radio America network, airing luminaries as varied and mottled as Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy. (Full disclosure: I once had an acting job on a television detective show guest-starring the old Murcius of Watergate.)

Against this, just one conservative network of many, there's Air America, a lonely voice for the other side. Bet they don't get invites to the nostalgia fests up at Sonny Barger's place. Makes you wonder how Obama got elected in the first place.

And maybe wonder just how much juice these puffballs really possess.

Gimme shelter!