Severin a pompous dimwit when it comes to health care and many other topics. His sour combination of arrogance and incompetence makes me want to hurl.

As an obvious ratings whore, you’d think that Jay would realize that small business owners are a key demographic for him. Or that small businesses are getting killed by health care premiums that have doubled since George W. Bush took office. But I guess that’s not in the playbook he’s reading from. For Severin, some things are even more important than ratings. Like echoing corporate lobbiests’ talking points word for word.

But as someone who used to work in radio, the thing that bothers me most about Serverin isn’t his political views. It’s the fact that in terms of the content and production, his show sucks.

Severin rarely informs. He’s a propagandist, not an educator. All the news that fits, he says. Anything that is outside his very concrete and formulaic agenda, he avoids. Maybe that worked in Mao’s China or the Soviet Union (after all, what other choice did they have?), but in a free society it’s a recipe for painfully boring radio.

More often than not Jay is behind news events, not ahead of them. He rarely has an interesting guest on the show. If he does have a guest, it is someone with views identical to his own, and since he is – in truth – a wimp, he is pathetically deferential to them. (If the guest is in the studio with him, Jay grovels to the point of requiring knee pads). Most of his callers, who don’t seem to be very bright at all, monotonously agree with him. He treats the ones who don’t with often cruel disrespect and hangs up on them. His skin is as thin as a Kleenex in a downpour.

I was excited when Severin got suspended because I enjoy and appreciate Michael Smirconich’s show. In contrast to Severin’s POS, Smirconich’s show is interesting, informative, and well- produced. Although he is allegedly conservative, Smirconich doesn’t wear his politics on his sleeve and is an independent thinker, not a propagandist shill like Severin. Smirconich is ahead of the news, not behind it, and he gets live interviews with the newsmakers themselves. Unlike Severin, he has the guts to honestly engage with people on all sides of the issue in a civil and respectful manner. He keeps the show moving and hits on multiple timely topics.

I really wish that someone would pick up Smirconich’s show in Boston. Severin’s ratings are in the gutter these days. But Smirconich would bury him for good in the ratings department, and for a whole lot less money.

With the speech-to-text technology now available at low cost, I wish someone would put up complete transcripts of Jay Severin’s show on the web for all to see. His words alone are indelible proof of how compromised and disturbed this buffoon really is.

The FedX analogy is ridiculous because the U.S. Postal Service is a pay for service “public option” that has not driven FedX and UPS out of business. To the contrary, those private entities had to streamline their services to make them less costly and more efficient than the postal service. This is precisely the goal of a public option health plan. To encourage private insurers to streamline services and make them less costly to the consumer.

Of course if you tried to explain this to Severin on air, he would simply cut off the call, call you a name (i.e. Peter Pan) and then mis-characterize your argument to his less than intelligent audience.

Oh, and I missed the part of the U.S. Constitution that bestows upon private business the right to do “whatever it wants to do, pretty much whatever it wants to do”. Maybe it’s in the Declaration of Independence?