I SUPPOSE it’s a little unfair to make fun of Alan Keyes Is Making Sense when ex–nude models are guzzling liquefied rooster balls on Larry King Live. Trust me: watching Alan Keyes trying to act normal is much weirder than anything Larry King could hope to concoct. A former Reagan-administration official, Keyes until now has been known chiefly for his two presidential campaigns, the principal feature of which was his absolutist stand on abortion rights. (As in "absolutely not.")

A couple of weeks ago the New York Times Magazine published a brief Q&A with Keyes. It turns out that Keyes is a big Lord of the Rings fan, which led his interrogator, the New Republic’s Michael Crowley (a former Phoenix staffer), to ask, "So if you had to be a hobbit, elf, or dwarf, would you be a hobbit, then?" Keyes’s answer: "That’s a tough choice. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to be a dwarf, because I think the dwarfs represent the industrial side of things. The hobbits represent the hidden virtue that resides on a façade of comfortable consumerism. And the elves represent the kind of wistful aspiration, that unwillingness to surrender the ideal even as it fades into the past. I guess there’s something about that that corresponds with my own life. So in the end I would be an elf."

Uh, okay, Mr. Ambassador. Whatever you say.

Now, the one thing you’ve got to give Keyes is that he really does possess a brilliant mind. It’s just that you never know where it’s going to take you. And you suspect that he doesn’t, either.

Take last Thursday’s show. His target was the California Student Safety and Violence Protection Act of 2000, which aims to protect gay and lesbian public-school students by teaching tolerance for homosexuality and transgender issues. Jabbing his finger at the camera, Keyes asserted that the law "actually does violence to the rights of other students in the schools," and conflicts with the religious-freedom guarantee of the First Amendment by "trying to dictate the path of conscience by which that result is to be achieved."

Trouble is, the show began with an Emily Latella moment from which Keyes never really recovered. His first guest, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Nanette Asimov, was there to explain what the law actually meant. And, at least according to her, the law’s provisions are largely voluntary, with local school districts and individual parents able to opt out of just about anything they don’t like. Some assault on the First Amendment. Never mind.

Keyes, though, was undaunted. During the nightly segment with three "ordinary people" (signaled by his donning of a cardigan sweater) and, later, a one-on-one with ubiquitous civil-rights lawyer Gloria Allred (his suit jacket back in place), Keyes kept repeating a view that was simultaneously offensive and way too subtle for television: that the law was an affront to those like himself, who oppose homosexuality on religious grounds (recall that the Vatican once opposed the earth’s revolving around the sun for similar reasons); and that children can be taught not to beat up gays and lesbians without brainwashing them with "tolerance." At one point, Keyes actually offered this analogy: "I teach my children to disapprove of drug dealers ... but I also successfully taught my children not to do violence against drug dealers."

But this was just a warm-up for Monday night’s show, the highlight of which was a much-hyped debate over torture with Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, a civil libertarian even more ubiquitous than Allred. For much of the previous week, Keyes had been promising that Dershowitz would advocate torture to get information out of terrorism suspects and that he would oppose it. Once again, though, Keyes’s high-powered, hard-to-steer mind took him way off course.

It happened during his sweater-clad "ordinary people" segment. Keyes, a Vietnam veteran, and a law-school student all opposed torture on the grounds that it was un-American and that investigators wouldn’t be able to trust information so obtained; a World War II veteran took the pro-torture side. The Vietnam veteran, in particular, was terrific, as erudite as Keyes but less in love with the sound of his own voice, talking knowledgeably about Saint Augustine and the just-war doctrine.

Toward the end of the segment, though, Keyes unexpectedly veered into a ditch. From out of nowhere, he suddenly asserted that if torture were really required to obtain information needed to stave off a massive terrorist attack, the president, as commander in chief, could order it, then pardon the torturers. The thought seemed spur-of-the-moment and half-baked; yet by the time Dershowitz appeared, after the break, it had grown into a full-blown constitutional theory. Now it was Keyes who seemed to be advocating torture and Dershowitz who opposed it.

Dershowitz’s position on torture following September 11 has been, well, tortured. What he has said and written is that, if authorities are going to torture suspects to obtain information about possible terrorist attacks, then they should first have to obtain a court order. He’s been caricatured as actually favoring torture, but as he told Keyes, "My goal is to try to eliminate torture or to reduce it." Yet, since no one in government is openly advocating torture, Dershowitz has ended up looking like he’s pro-torture by default. And he’s taken a lot of heat for that.

So when Keyes started ranting that the president can order suspects to be tortured, a grin started to spread across Dershowitz’s face, as though he couldn’t believe his good fortune. Rather than having to defend his notion of judicially sanctioned torture, Dershowitz was able to go after Keyes, accusing him of taking the same position that led to Richard Nixon’s abuses of power. "You’re saying the president has the right to do illegal, unconstitutional acts," the Dersh thundered.

Well, sort of, but not really. I guess. As best as I could figure out, Keyes’s convoluted argument is that torture is almost always wrong, and should never be sanctioned by law, as Dershowitz proposes to do. But if it’s absolutely necessary, the president can order it, and risk impeachment by Congress or rebuke by the Supreme Court. "I have never said that it is right," Keyes pleaded. "I have said that sometimes it must be done out of necessity."

For the first time in nearly five months, Dershowitz had taken part in a debate over torture and had come out looking good.

TIME FOR A REALITY check. Few people are ever going to see Alan Keyes Is Making Sense, even in the unlikely event that the show is a hit. Fox, the top-rated cable news channel, draws an average audience about the same as the circulation of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, shut down last month for lack of readers and advertisers. Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox’s top-rated program, has about one-tenth as many viewers as Rush Limbaugh has listeners. The Big Three network newscasts draw about 30 million viewers per night; the Big Three cable news outlets draw about 1.5 million. National Public Radio’s two drive-time newscasts attract nearly 10 million listeners apiece every week.

As Chicago Tribune media columnist Steve Johnson recently wrote, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are still strictly the "minor leagues." Still, they are a continual disappointment even for news junkies — and that’s a missed opportunity to grab an audience that actually cares about news and public affairs.

No, it’s not all garbage. The Aaron Brown–anchored NewsNight, on CNN, is quite good. MSNBC’s Brian Williams anchors what may be television’s best nightly newscast (yes, far better than PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer), although it would be nice to see more reporting and fewer talking heads. Fox’s Brit Hume is as solid as they come.

Nor is Alan Keyes necessarily the bottom of the barrel. His show may even be better than such MSNBC classics as Headliners & Legends, the celebrity-bio series that nobody watches, and MSNBC Investigates, which has brought us inside looks at such gripping topics as convenience-store security cameras and tattoos.

But cable news’s emphasis these days isn’t news, it’s personality, celebrity, and talk, talk, talk. That was bad enough before September 11, when we were fat, happy, and oblivious. These days, it’s inexcusable.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net