Andrew Stuttaford points out that despite the popular perception, there’s very little about Arianna Huffington that could be properly labeled “conservative.” I don’t know if there’s this perception of her as right wing because of her history (a bizarre one, in which she was married to a rich Republican liberal who almost beat Diane Feinstein in her first Senatorial election, and then divorced him after he came out of the closet about his sexual preference for men), that’s simply hanging on from inertia, or what.

One possibility is that the press likes to have liberals who they can label as conservative, so that when the supposed “conservative” opposes some Republican position, they can say, “Gee, this must really be an egregiously neanderthal policy if even the conservative Arianna Huffington is against it…”

I was thinking about this the other day while listening to a radio program on KCRW (the LA NPR affiliate) called “Left, Right and Center.” It’s hosted by Matt Miller (former Clinton budget guy), with Arianna and Robert Scheer. I guess the idea was that Scheer was left (no question about that), Huffington was “right,” and that Mr. Miller represented the center. It was always kind of laughable, but today it just seems ridiculously so.

In fact, to demonstrate how sinister-tilted they all are, they had David Frum on to defend the Administration’s policy on affirmative action in general and the Michigan case in particular. All three sides of the supposed political spectrum proceeded to gang up on both him and the Administration (though Miller at least was willing to acknowledge that the Administration might have some merit in some of its arguments).

The show’s title should be “Left, Lefter and Loony.” But then, it’s NPR, where they have both kinds of politics–liberal and progressive.

[Update on Tuesday morning]

N. Z. Bear informs me that I’m behind the times–Frum is now a regular, and that he is the right. OK, that still begs the question, what the heck is Arianna?