Home accents

You know what keeps me up at night?

Among other things, a recurring fantasy of swapping the McLaughlin Group regulars for the personnel of various home improvement shows.

Not that I'd find their politics any more congenial, though you never know. Rather, the trick is to pick panelists who--like Buchanan, Blankley, Clift, and the Big Guy himself--are sporting distinctive regional phonologies and/or lexicons.

Sweet dialectal dissonance!

The Extreme Team are out, because Ty and his goddamn bullhorn constitute an unfair advantage. And most of the crews on TLC and HGTV are just to linguistically bland to put up much of a fight. I might, as a bit of affirmative action, pull in P. Allen Smith; he is a gardener, after all. But I draw the line at Christopher Lowell, dammit.

My dream match-up, however, would be the Min-ne-soh-tan long vowels of "Hooooometime" up against the Beantown blather of "Aaaaahhhsk This Old House" in mortal rhetorical combat.

Just imagine McLaughlin trying to moderate those two teams as they duke it out over North Korea or stems cells or Barack in 2008...

And if they had two-by-fours with protruding 16-penny nails in easy reach...