AA Going, Going, Gone.

Despite persistent stories of bloated egos and seemingly biannual stupid management decisions, the loss of any of our few non-wingnut media stalwarts is hard to take:

Liberal talk-radio station Air America files for bankruptcy, will go off the air

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 22, 2010

Air America, the liberal talk-radio network that helped boost the careers of Al Franken and Rachel Maddow, said Thursday that it was declaring bankruptcy and going off the air.

The company, founded in 2004 and based in New York, strove to provide left-leaning commentary and call-in programs as an alternative to such popular conservative radio talkers as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.

It was troubled almost from the start. The company had difficulty lining up affiliates and attracting a sizable audience. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection just 30 months after its inception and was resold to an investor group in early 2007 for $4.25 million.
...

Because even one occasion where the good guys go home in limousines and the bad guys have to hold bake sales would obviously overthrow some primal natural of law.

So unless someone is coming forward to announce that this is just one more, obscure, genius En Passant move in the Grand Game of 13 Dimensional Progressive Political Chess which we groundlings are too dim to understand, there is nothing left but to bid Air America

a fond farewell.


UPDATE: Not to mock the corpse's shoes at the wake or anything, but perhaps someone should either take down this "Air America Radio Cruise" site or explain to us proles what the Plan B. I mention it because I had elaborate plans to wheedle a magazine editor into picking up the tab for my passage on the cruise, whereupon I would have blogged for said magazine daily about the folkways, manners and nightly liberal prayer meetings of my shipboard companions

ala Mark Twain, whose short sketches of his adventures as a passenger on the "Quaker City" tour (one of America's very first, luxury cruises) provided his paper with lively reading, and were eventually compiled into "The Innocents Abroad"; the book that made Twain's literary reputation and set him on the road to fame and fortune and poverty and fortune again and, finally, immortality.

I was going to call my opus "The Dissidents Abroad".

And why would I undertake to make such a dangerous voyage?

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

- Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"

That's why.

Well, perhaps some magazine editor with a keen eye for the commercial possibilities of closely-observed, finely-wordsmithed vivisection would like to stake me to one of the Conservative cruise alternatives.

And, yes, I'm looking at you Will Dana. And you, Graydon Carter. And you, James Bennet.