His list of enemies included liberals, gays, minorities, feminists, welfare recipients and just about any one who disagreed with him. His friends included loathsome creatures like white supremacist David Duke, who was a frequent guest on his program, and Bernie Goetz, the vigilante who shot and wounded four black teenagers in the subway. Grant bemoaned during his interview with Goetz that he should've "finished the job by killing them all." He once referred to Martin Luther King, Jr. as a "slime ball" and "phony" and former New York mayor David Dinkins as a "men's room attendant."
His low point, assuming there ever was one, occurred in 1996. After a plane crash killed 35 people, Grant openly hoped that Bill Clinton's commerce secretary Ron Brown, who was on the flight, was among the dead. That comment got him fired from WABC. Sadly, he was back on the air two weeks later at another radio station.
He eventually came back to WABC and, for the last three years of his career, hosted a Sunday show. Though considerably older and crankier, Grant nonetheless remained as crude and obnoxious as ever, hanging up on callers he disagreed with and attacking anyone on the Left who infuriated him. He finally retired his white hood in 2012, but his legacy, sadly, still lives on.
So the next time you tune into Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, remember it was Grant who opened the gates of hell for them to walk through. Like Andrew Breitbart before him, there will be no tears in heaven over Grant's passing. The damage he did to talk radio was as reprehensible as it was irreparable.
Good riddance, I say.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/nyregion/bob-grant-a-pioneer-of-right-wing-talk-radio-dies-at-84.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&rref=television&hpw
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