The producer from Fox News, agenuinely nice guy (“We’re all just people here on this planet,” one of themsaid to me once; it’s true), calls Sunday afternoon and asked if I wanted tocome on Monday morning at 9:15 am ET to talk with Bill and Megyn and anothertalk-show-host about Joe Biden being confronted on being a socialist.

“Sure,” says I. “No problem.”

Anyhow, I’m told that the show will be all about socialism. And its opposite, capitalism. Sorry, says I, but the opposite of socialism isn’t capitalism. It’s fascism. Socialism and fascism are political systems.

Capitalism is an economic system, and can exist just fine with either socialism or fascism– or even with our most familiar political system, democracy, which can also contain elements of both socialism and fascism (and here in America, does).

But Barbara West of WFTV in Florida has somehow learned one phrase from “The Communist Manifesto” and thought she’d try it out on Joe Biden. It was really a rather tragic sight.

I did news in the Lansing, Michigan market for years and as a news reporter who regularly interviewed the Mayor, the Governor, members of the state legislature, etc., I knew that the first rule of “news” is that you leave your opinions at the door. On the other hand, what I do for a living now – talk radio – is pure opinion. I make no pretense to being a reporter.

So if Barbara West was hired by WFTV to do news, she should be fired. On the other hand, if she was hired to be a political commentator and the Biden campaign hadn’t figured that out, then Biden campaign’s booker should be fired.

And if she’s looking for any “fair and slightly unbalanced” (the slogan of my show) advice, here are a couple of similar questions for John McCain: “Mussolini defined fascism as the merger of corporations and the state. When you began your campaign with over 100 corporate lobbyists on your staff, including the top lobbyist for Fannie May in the top position, why didn’t you tell the American people that you intend to turn this country into a fascist state?”

Or, “Marie Antoinette famously said, of people starving in France in the late 1700s, ‘Let them eat cake.’ You’ve voted to cut veterans benefits, against increasing the minimum wage, and to limit unemployment benefits. Do you think that hungry people should be fed cake, allowed to starve, or should we simply deport them to Australia like England did with the Irish?”

All of this, of course, is pretty tongue in cheek. I don’t think McCain is a pure fascist any more than Biden is a pure socialist. At first, watching Barbara West, I thought I was watching a setup done by Stephen Colbert for his show – and apparently Joe Biden did, too!

Sadly, though, West isn’t doing commentary. That would require her to know, at least, what socialism is. And she sure isn’t doing news.