The phenomenon of the Randi Rhodes Conversion.

I'm a hothead. A really pissed-off Abbie Hoffman Democrat who has trouble talking to conservatives without swiftly getting really, really angry, probably because I grew up with an angry Goldwater father, and we all know how that works, don't we.

I've been a Randi Rhodes addict for many years now. I like the hard stuff, the fact-based stream, don't much care about packaging. I like science and history, Martin Luther King's words get to me, I think Bobby Kennedy was The Bomb; I have a wife, two kids, a business, and a creative writing/music jones; therefore I am the classic demographic strata for her particular brand of Thing That She Does, which is rabidly honest news analysis with a monsterly keen intellect, and a sharp sense of humor. I love her brain, therefore I listen.

She does something I cannot do.

She will reason with a conservative caller, really slowly, with an impossible patience that makes my teeth ache. Often, she gets tagged with a reputation for impatience, and it is true that she has no patience for the weak-minded left-minded; she's rougher with her own. But for the honest conservative caller, she will extend herself farther than any human being I've ever heard, with a zenlike informational authority, a mother's concern for a sick child. She tolerates no name-calling, and she will not deal easily with the purposefully obtuse. But for the honest conservative, the honorably misled, the truly lost innocent soul -- she will reach out, and help.

I've heard her do this hundreds of times now. It's shocking how good at it she is. Inspiring. It never ends well; they always hang up, just because they can't stay in the light any longer. I swear, it's just like that -- she's a candle. and they struggle violently to blow her out, and then flee from the unquenchable flame, back into the darkness from which they came.

A year or two later, they call back.

Once a week, one of them calls. They explain who they were, and where they came from; then they thank her, with deep sincerity, for their rescue.

It's the most important part of the show for me, because it is something I cannot do, but that I know is the right thing to do; to love them, to extend the branch of honest information, to reveal to them the beauty of the Deeper American, the real meaning of those so-powerful words that conservatives tend to confuse with primitive tribalistic impulses, with the Old Sparks from the medulla oblongata, the part of us that still swims in the warm dark water, and to do it with the brave patience of the True Believer, the Questioner, The Seeker After Knowledge. She is a Loving Political Scientist, and she lets none of the Lost escape.

When a 'liberal' calls into a conservative radio station and 'converts', I automatically know that it's fake. No one backslides into conservative thought without a) a catastrophic event that significantly alters higher brain function, b) a pre-existing neural state that manifests itself as religious panic or existential vertigo, disabling higher brain function, or c) too much money to refuse. It's not a developmental conversion, but a de-evolution, a loss of wisdom, a failing, a fracture, a falling down.

However, it's more than possible for a conservative to wake up. Perhaps not the sufferers of a pre-existing neural state, or those who've had a catastrophic event that has significantly altered their brain function; but for those who simply don't know, who have never been allowed to truly consider facts and come to conclusions, it is not only possible, but humanly probable, given the proper stimulus.

The rage I feel toward these people is not the proper stimulus. Unrelentingly patient love, a devotion to the sweet science of reason, the gorgeous metaphor of clean statistic, and actual History -- these are the gifts that Randi Rhodes brings to bear, the power that I honor her for, and the ability that my Better Self wishes to grow into. I want to rescue people, just like she does.

She always says the same thing to these former conservatives, some of whom are now campaigning for Obama, some holding down a cold tent with the Occupy, some just talking to their friends with gentle words, passing along that thrilling and life-affirming virus that Randi spreads whenever she speaks -- Sister Reason, and Brother Fact. She says: "It takes a real man to admit when you're wrong." Some of them express joy, some chatter away excitedly, and some cry -- it is a frightening thing to be a human being, born on the outside of this baked mud ball to grow and live and die in the Strangely Random Universe, but it is even more frightening to think that Black People are scary, that Liberals love Al-Qaeda, or that Free Women hate Life.

Watch Alexandra Pelosi's documentary, Right America: Feeling Wronged] for a good idea of what the condition of the mind and soul of the conservative actually is. Some are sick, some are abused, and some are just poisoned with lifetimes full of violence and repetitive, mechanistic fear-imagery; but some are intelligent and loving, just lost, terribly confused, and frustrated by the illogic of the suffocating cultural curtain that surrounds them. It is these souls that Randi saves, and I have never heard anything like it before.

Wish I could do that. Want to do that. Maybe someday I'll be able to do that.