Lou Dobbs Excited for His New FBN Show, Even if it Means Sharing a Network with Imus

"Lou Dobbs Tonight" premiered on the Fox Business Network earlier this week, and rather than screaming about illegal immigrants and President Obama’s birth certificate, as he did at CNN, Dobbs is taking the high road.
 
His new show, he told Imus, will focus on “the intersection of business and politics,” specifically the markets, corporate America, and the political currents running through both.
 
“There has never been a more perilous and fascinating period,” said Dobbs. “The Chinese curse, ‘May we live in interesting times’—the curse is being realized, unfortunately.”
 
The negative reaction by the international financial markets to last week’s devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which begat an ongoing nuclear emergency in the country, re-enforced for Imus just how interconnected the world has become.
 
“There is—even if only at the margins—a relationship between what happens with one country and the next, and that’s what we’re watching,” Dobbs said, then listened as Imus noted surprised he was that a country as forward-thinking as Japan was not more prepared for this disaster.
 
Though he, too, was surprised by Japan’s seeming lack of vigilance in protecting its infrastructure from ruin, Dobbs acknowledged that human beings are rarely as smart as they think they are.
 
“We’re never as prepared as we thought, and our relative level of sophistication is often considerably short of the mark,” he said. “And what we think of perhaps as sophistication becomes, really, hubris, and the results can be devastating and deadly.”
 
Dobbs believes that anybody criticizing the way Japan’s government has been responding to this crisis needs to consider the extraordinary circumstances in which they find themselves.
 
“This is a country dealing with the most powerful earthquake to ever hit their nation in history, followed quickly—within minutes—by one of the largest tsunamis, shattering their northeastern coast, displacing several million people, and trying to deal with the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl,” Dobbs said. “I think, on the whole, they’re doing, frankly, a hell of a job.”
 
The very American desire for immediate resolution needs to be kept in check, in his opinion, along with the expectation that ambiguity is easily dissolved. Yet despite all the big scary words he used this morning, Dobbs remains optimistic about this country.
 
“We’re looking at economic growth, we’re starting to see a stronger—but not adequate—rate of growth in jobs,” he said. “We need to return this country to prosperity.”
 
In the meantime, Dobbs is returning himself to the airwaves with "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on the Fox Business Network, a team he is “delighted” to be a part of, even if it includes Imus.
 
“Of course you’re delighted,” Imus chimed in. “You got blown out of CNN—where the hell were you gonna go?”
 
You can’t buy a warmer welcome than that.
 
-Julie Kanfer