Surprise visit from The Dude: the real one, who inspired The Big Lebowski (Jeff Dowd) www.jeffdowd.com. He's a big fan of Left, Right & Center and dropped by to do KCRW's Guest DJ Project http://www.kcrw.com/music/kcrw-guest-dj- project. Meantime, on today's show we talk about Guns and SCOTUS; North Korea Nukes; Oil; Democratic Unity and Obamacons. Visit our new blog for links to articles mentioned http://leftrightandcenter.vox.com/; special guest right is Jim Antle, associate editor of the conservative mag, The American Spectator. Listen to today's show here: http://www.kcrw.com/media-player/mediaPl ayer2.html?type=audio&id=lr080627sco tus_on_gunsn_kore

Did you miss this? Satirist Harry Shearer www.KCRW.com/etc/programs/ls interviewed Arianna Huffington, Webby Award-winning blogger/editor-in-chief of Huffingtonpost.com, and a regular panelist on the station's popular political week-in-review show, Left, Right & Center www.kcrw.com/news/programs/lr. They discuss her newest book, Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. It's serious fun. Listen here:

Our show was recorded before the shocking news about Tim Russert's death. We are tremendously saddened by the news and offer our deepest sympathies to his family.

Arianna Huffington is shilling her new book on TPM Cafe, and it's just an exercise in "telling them what they want to hear" for her target demographic.

"The American genius is about bringing out the extraordinary in ordinary people."

This is flatter-the-mob populism at its worst, and the real story is more like tremendously extraordinary people somehow contriving to allow ordinary people to live ordinary human lives.

In Europe a farmer was just a peon bound to the land and forced to subsist on a fraction of his crop while landlords ate the rest, but in America those ordinary farmers could live ordinary human lives, because Washington and Jefferson and Madison made a republic to protect them from the lords of old Europe.

In the Old South a black man was nothing but a thing, but Lincoln made a war against the institution of slavery, and when none of his generals would fight a battle against other white men to free the slaves, he replaced them one after another until William Tecumseh Sherman broke the back of the South, and Martin Luther King and Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson completed this great work, and none of them were ordinary men, but they made it possible for black men and women to live ordinary lives, and if pampered zillionaires like Arianna Huffington don't think that's good enough, and try to inflate expectations beyond ordinary life, the rest of us should remember that for most of human history almost nobody had the privilege of living an ordinary human life, and almost nobody enjoys that privilege today outside a few lucky countries like the United States.

It's easy to lose the extraordinary privilege of leading an ordinary life by chasing "lifestyles" that only exist on TV, and the United States has almost managed to trade away the ordinary pleasures of human existence for the pig-paradise of unlimited consumerism.

If we somehow draw back from the brink of economic and environmental disasters, and somehow pass along the extraordinary privilege of living an ordinary human life to the next generation, it won't be because flatter-the-mob populists like Arianna Huffington have conjured up dreams of reality-show superheroes...

It will be because extraordinary leaders like Winston Churchill have inspired ordinary people to make the ordinary sacrifices of ordinary human existence for the common good.

"Blood, sweat, toil, and tears..." There's nothing extraordinary about any of it.

Hear Tony Blankley, Newt Gingrich's former press secretary, call W's former press secretary Scott McClellan "an inconsequential cipher." Robert Scheer thinks Hillary is trying to be the new Margaret Thatcher. Matt Miller and Arianna Huffington say they want a leader who'll fight for the right to serve -- but just not Hillary. And remembering Sydney Pollack.

If you love Hillary, you won't love today's Left, Right & Center...but it's a good show, with discussion of Hillary's endgame (I know! don't blame me, I am just the messenger!), McCain's age, health and Veepstakes, Obama's gaffe and lastly, Bob blames Bush for high oil prices. We'd love to hear your comments, tune in to the podcast anytime, the live stream at 2:30 and 7 pm pacific time, or listen later on-demand at KCRW.com. (Oh yeah: in SoCal, we're on air, too! We are a radio station, after all! 89.9 FM and other frequencies.)

Arianna Huffington made some waves this week when she revealed that John McCain, at a 2001 dinner party, told her and other guests that he hadn't voted for George W. Bush in 2000. While the McCain campaign is outright denying it, trying to smear Arianna in the process, other people at the dinner party, including The West Wing's Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff backed up Arianna's story.

"He was going on and on about how horribly unqualified and untested Bush was, how the campaign had attacked his family," said Whitford, a registered Democrat. "Someone said, 'If he's so terrible, why did you support him?'"

McCain replied that as a member of the GOP, Whitford added, he always intended to back the party's nominee. Then, the actor said, someone asked McCain whether he had cast a vote in favor of Bush.

"He put his finger up to his lips, shook his head and mouthed, 'No way,'" Whitford said.

What's amazing is the lengths John McCain is going to claim that of course he voted for Bush, and indeed did so twice. Watch him on O'Reilly below and see for yourself a. what a bad liar he is (as Arianna points out today, McCain lets his Freudian slip show...) but also b. how he just handed the Democrats another custom made ad against him.

Watch it HERE.

So much for distancing himself from Bush, eh? I mean, not only is he insisting that he did everything he could to help Bush get elected...twice...but he's lying about it (granted, it could be the case that he lied to Arianna et al, but either way he's a liar and judging by his little performance with Bill O, I feel fairly certain he's lying now.) In the process, of course, McCain is just reinforcing the Democratic narrative about him as a Bush Republican AND undermining his own maverick image. Not voting for Bush WAS actually a maverick-y thing to do but now, instead, he's sucking up to Mr. 28%, which, as Arianna says, shows just how far he's fallen.

At the same time, though, one can see why lying is McCain's only real path here. If he were to admit to not having voted for Bush, the next logical question would be "so, who did you vote for" and the two most obvious options are problematic for different reasons: 1. "I didn't vote" or 2. "I wrote myself in" (surely he never would have voted for Gore.)

In this article this morning on Huffington Post, The 2008 Race for President and the Search for Our Better Selves, Arianna Huffington essentially reveals her own feelings about the presidential election and whom she supports. And you just don't have to read that deeply between the lines to get the gist.