August 22, 2011 05:57 PM UTC

KFKA's Oliver advocates government dismantlement but forgets about it when Gardner jumps on board

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• by: Jason Salzman

(Gardner’s adventures in AM radio continue – promoted by Colorado Pols)

“The Amy Oliver Show made national news,” Amy Oliver told her KFKA listeners Aug. 11, reading the headline from The Hill, a Washington-DC blog, “GOP lawmaker OK with dismantling DOT.”

“That’s not exactly what he said,” Oliver explained to her radio audience, apparently forgetting that Gardner was talking with Oliver when he said it’s a “great” idea to “basically turn the Department of Transportation back to the states.” (See transcript here.)

I emailed Oliver to find out why she thought Gardner didn’t say what he said in plain English (and then did not retract).

“Interpret the dialogue as you wish,” she wrote back. “The only story I see here is that a freshman Congressman is thinking outside the box for solutions to our current budget situation.”

I appreciated Oliver getting back to me, but I wish she’d have answered my question about why she let Gardner off the hook, overlooking sounds and words that she got first hand.

You’d have to assume that Oliver herself supports dismantling the Department of Transportation, given that Oliver works for Caldara’s Independence Institute and all.

So you’d think she would embrace Gardner’s dismantlement position, not deny it. It’s not every day that a Congressman jumps on board with dismantlement of a major federal agency.

I mean, in the same Aug. 5 interview with Gardner, before she asked him about the Department of Transportation, Oliver told Gardner that the Environmental Protection Agency is “one agency that I think should be completely dismantled.”

In fact, she asked Gardner point blank, “When are we going to de-fund the EPA.” Gardner answered that the EPA had taken a “significant funding decrease,” and he said he hoped more was on the way.

Later, Oliver told Gadner: “You can’t de-fund the EPA until you get the Senate on board.”

To which Gardner responded, “Right.”

Oliver didn’t get Gardner to agree with her that EPA should be abolished.

But if she had, you wonder if she’d have denied what he said to her, once it was reported in the news media.