…when I said, “Goodbye” to Bob Edwards on his annual August vacation (”I’ll see you on Labor Day”) and was shocked to hear a two-host format, with the bothersome Renee Montagne and the boringly bland Steve Inskeep. Almost every day, I’d remark to my daughter, or my wife, or to the air around me, “Lord, I can’t wait until Bob gets back and this crap stops.”

It never occured to me that anyone listening to this local-news-clone happy-talk garbage would actually think it was good, so it never occured to me to email the pinstripes at NPR to complain about their assult on my mornings. I mean, geez, even they had to be able to hear for themselves how lame it is, thought I. Apparently, four or five people wrote to them telling them how good this claptrap was, though, and that empowered them to make the change permanent…although at the beginning of September last year, it never occured to any of us that this would be the case, and we would not only have to face this junk every morning, but lose the one bright spot we could depend on, too.

Maybe if all of us who despise the “dumbing-down” of our previously-famous morning show had complained, it might have made a difference. But then again, of course it wouldn’t…if 50,000 complaints after Bob Edwards was canned didn’t dent the dogmatism of these pinstripes who know better than the rest of us what we want to hear in the morning, certanly complaints about the show when they had it on tryout wouldn’t have bothered them one whit. They’d just trash the many comments that disagree with them, while holding high the tiny few that agree.

And their arguments are just plain goofy:

We need hosts with reporting creds.

Nonsense. You need a host that people trust. The reporters need the curriculum vitae, the host needs to be someone we believe in. The producers should be, too, but you really screwed that pooch, now didn’t you?

We need two hosts to keep the show fresh.

You mean you want it to sound like All Things Considered, which itself has fallen downhill over the past few years. Here’s a shock, kids; morning ain’t afternoon drivetime. We want someone, some ONE, to gently ease us into our day. Most of the news you’re feeding us is bad; we need someone who understands how to get it to us without hurting us. The “Barbie-And-Ken” dog-and-pony show you’re giving us now simply insults us.

We need a California perspective.

Oh, shut up. California had a porn queen running for governor, and a lousy actor is governor. We really don’t care what anyone in California has to say after all that.

(Ok, ok, I’m only kidding. The truth is, you wasted all that money on building “NPR West” to appease a couple of board members from the West Coast, and now you’re desperately looking for any excuse to use it, no matter how lame. You simply ignore how mind-numbingly stupid it is to have someone sitting in a studio in Los Angeles at 3:00am interviewing some reporter in Washington, D.C. about something happening in the Middle East while broadcasting to listeners on the East Coast.)

We need to send our hosts out on assignment.

Again, shut up. It drives me crazy when Dan Rather rushes out to some god-forsaken place to “report” on a story, too. He’s an anchor, so let him anchor. He is not a reporter, and shouldn’t be - that is not his role. His job is to place a reporter’s piece into perspective; where the reporter sees only the story, the host should see the larger picture, helping us understand, for example, how events in Iraq affect Afghanistan,or the Presidential race. Of course, the major networks don’t have the ability for perspective…this is the advantage NPR has over them, and the advantage you are determined to undermine. The only idiots who think it’s a good idea to have the hosts out “on assignment” are the “consultants” who are advising puny local-news stations…you know, the same ones who advise remote reporting from the scene of old news? (”We go now live to Emily in the middle of nowhere…Emily, are you there?” “Hello, Ron and Janelle; although everything here is dark and quiet now, just six hours ago the scene was awash with police officers searching for the missing puppy…”)

And I gotta tell you, NPR is wasting way too much time with hosts interviewing reporters - and this complaint is across the board, not just on the “new-and-unimproved” morning show. I thought there was too much of it when Bob was doing the interviewing, but I really despise it in the hands of those less capable (that is, pretty much everyone else on-staff). You are paying reporters to report, so let them file their stories instead of being asked about them. Too early in the morning to get a report filed, you say? Then hire better reporters, those who own alarm clocks and aren’t afraid to use them. I don’t mind an interview with someone like Cokie Roberts, but that isn’t news, it analysis. Calling some reporter on the phone and asking, “What’s happening there?” is a titanic waste of your listener’s time.

It’s our show, we’ll do what we damned well please.

Yep, sure is; even though we listeners used to have the mistaken impression it was our show, you sure showed us how wrong we were, didn’t you? So now, those of us who can’t stand the new NPR morning show (I cannot bring myself to call it by the same name as the one I listened to and enjoyed for so many years) wait patiently for The Bob Edwards Show to premier on XM Radio (my Roady2 is in a UPS truck making it cross-country as I type this, and I’m putting together yet-another-computer to connect it to for automated time-shifting) and listen in the meantime to the BBC World Service, PRI, and even the Voice of America searching for something that is as thought-provoking and interesting as Morning Edition once was. Some of us go so far as to encourage our friends and others to stop contributing to NPR member stations, in the forlorn hope that if the member stations begin to feel a pinch, they might rise up and throttle the pinstripes who are destroying everything National Public Radio has built up over the last thirty years…heck, by diverting the money that used to support member stations to paying for XM service, we can support PRI and other public radio organizations without any of our money going to NPR. Win-win, as far as I can see.

But the truth is, some of us hope that someone at the network will have the intelligence to see what’s happening, and reverse the trend before there’s nothing left.

Of course, I ain’t holding my breath in the meantime…