They run the old Carson shows on Antenna TV, one of the retro stations, so I make a point to catch those. The one thing I never payed attention to back in the 70's and 80's was how liberally biased Carson was, which really showed in his slams against Republican Presidents versus democrat.
You might consider that, during Johnny Carson's tenure at the helm of
The Tonight Show, he spent more
years hosting the show during Republican presidencies than Democratic ones: he took the show over in
February 1962, during the Kennedy presidency, and ended in May 1992 during the last days of George H.W.
Bush. He had six years of Kennedy/Johnson, eight of Nixon/Ford, four of Jimmy Carter, eight of Ronald Reagan,
and three and a half of the first Bush. I can remember he was just as full of zingers toward Johnson and Carter
as toward anyone else sitting in the White House; it was a question of who was there at the time, and he did M.C.
Ronald Reagan's first inaugural in the bargain. (I had to read about some of his zaps on JFK since I didn't get
to see the show at that time.) And when he hosted Friar's Club roasts---before Dean Martin turned them into
a semi-weekly series---he often had Reagan among the roasters.
Carson himself had a few liberal attitudes but his former lawyer once said Carson was generally "anti-big---anti-
big government, anti-big money, anti-big bullies, anti-big blowhards." He punctured Republican and Democratic
blowhards with fairly equivalent brio, which might explain why, say, such a Republican as Alfonse D'Amato could
be a Carson target but such a Democrat as Daniel Patrick Moynihan (today, someone like Moynihan would probably be
excommunicated from the Democratic Party) wasn't.
