…concerning the sexual harassment suit placed against Bill O’Reilly by a disgruntled female staffer. The charges, if true, are despicable; but, as we’ve all seen, such behavior is too sadly common among egotistical powermongers of assorted ideological persuasions.

However, I was intrigued by a remark by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (what the hell is this guy with at least two thirds of a brain still doing on a channel that’s actively vying to become more dumbed-down than Fox?). Olbermann compared O’Reilly to one Boake Carter, a controversial ’30s radio commentator totally forgotten today (except for one quotation—”In the time of war the first casualty is truth”).

Boake Carter’s life story, as told by Olbermann and confirmed by a quick net search, has little in common with O’Reilly’s. But it’s still fascinating.

In the early years of network radio, Carter had risen from a local reporter in Philadelphia to a network “editorialist.” By 1932 he had a regular 15-minute opinion show, in which he lectured on the events of the day. As the ’30s depressingly wore on, Carter’s ideology apparently became more stridently anti-Semitic, anti-FDR, anti-liberal, etc. In 1938 his sponsor chose not to renew his contract.

It took a year for him to find another home, on Mutual (the WB of radio networks). On his new show he was pro-Roosevelt and pro-Jewish. He even announced his allegiance to a “Biblical Hebrewism” sect, the Society of the Bible in the Hands of its Creators. But that turned out to be a personality cult of the basest kind. Carter lost his professional reputation, wife, home, and fortune to the cult’s leader. By the time Carter died in 1944, he’d already become a has-been.