You would have been proud of me this morning. I was directing cartoon-type voices and in the studio next to us, a whopping six yards away, Ben Stein was recording something. I resisted the temptation to go over and ask him, "Uh, in light of these new revelations in the Johnson tapes, have you lost any of your respect for that Nixon guy you used to write speeches for?"
I used to like Ben Stein and would cite him as an example of that rarest of breeds — a funny Conservative. He occasionally still is and once in a while, since he isn't out to run for anything and doesn't make money telling the right-wing what it wants to hear, he says something disarmingly honest. But that's once in a while and he has much to answer for, including attempts to spin facts to try and rehabilitate Richard Nixon's image, his opposition to the Theory of Evolution and whatever role he played in Jimmy Kimmel having a career.