MPR’s In The Loop
Tricia, Sam and I went to Minnesota Public Radio Thursday night for a live taping of a show called “In The Loop” with Jeff Horwich on the topic of diplomacy.
Diplomacy is a great topic for debate these days, with Iraq, Iran and North Korea, but also with the results from last week’s election. Now we have politicians on both sides talking about how we need to work together to get things done, and this after so many years of doing exactly the opposite.
The first guest on the show was Tom Hanson, an expert on diplomacy, with 21 years in the US diplomatic core in places like East Germany, France and Russia. I really enjoyed his interview, as he helped describe the different ideas in Washington, and really made me understand that Bush isn’t as much of an idiot as I thought – he, and Rice, just have different ideas for diplomacy and how spreading freedom is the most important role they have (called transformational diplomacy), and spreading freedom is the way to create peace. While I might not agree with their policies, at least now I feel like I understand them a little better.
The highlight of the show came up next with a mashup of a fake couples counseling session with Nancy Pelosi and George Bush. It was absolutely hilarious, and you can download it here.
Unfortunately after those two excellent pieces, the show got a little boring. The next guests were two local Korean men that had differing ideas on how to deal with Kim Jong Il. It could have been interesting to hear, but due to some language difficulties, the two men had a hard time explaining their ideas and the interview suffered.
Thankfully though there was another funny part at the end, with a story on how Minnesota Nice got Kim Jong Il to the table to talk. Jeff Horwich (the host) did a great Bush impression, and the kid that did Kim Jong Il was just making sounds into a cup, but it worked well enough.
I did enjoy seeing a live taping of a show like this, especially for free, but also to see the new MPR building which was awesome. It was modern and clean and the UBS Forum had a really sweet view of the Capitol. I’d like to go again so hopefully they will have another interesting topic again next time.
MPR has the show available for download which is really nice.
Just out poking around for reactions to the show — glad you guys had a good time, and I hope we’ll see you again. Don’t know if you got a chance to listed to the edited-down version of the Korean interview — I think it came out real nice in the end, though I’ll admit we had to work hard for that one.