Rich Karlgaard on Childless Talk Show Hosts

Rich Karlgaard is the publisher of Forbes Magazine.
He makes an observation worth noting about some talk-show hosts.
Not all of them, mind you. But enough to make the point.

No kids.

...Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and the other yakkers stand to gain if Obama or Clinton becomes president. Where do you think these political pundits' motives lie? Are they for America or themselves?

Let me make another point--sure to be controversial. What do Limbaugh, Coulter and Ingraham have in common besides their out-of-proportion attacks on McCain?

They are all childless.

Call me biased, but when one has children, one quickly learns the arts of compromise and patience. One thinks about the future in a different way. If one is going to be a successful parent, one must grow beyond adolescent narcissism and rigidity and become, in a word, an adult.

Many people can become an adult without having or raising children. Mother Teresa could. I admit that I couldn't have. I think most people are more like me than Mother Teresa.

The thrice-married and -divorced Limbaugh has no children. It's all about Rush, you see.

The never-married Ingraham and Coulter have no children either. Ingraham is essentially the same person now as she was in Dartmouth when, according to Wikipedia, she "once attended meetings of a gay student organization for the purpose of publicly outing them in the newspaper." Ingraham secretly taped a meeting of the Gay Students Association and published the transcript, identifying students by name and calling them "sodomites." That is hateful. Ten years later, Ingraham "tempered" her views on gays and moved on to other targets.

Coulter, in a speech last week, said, "I'm not comparing McCain to Hitler...Hitler had a coherent tax policy."

This is not how responsible grownups talk. But, then, Coulter is not a responsible grownup.