Matt Towery runs the polling company InsiderAdvantage, is a best-selling author and a nationally-syndicated columnist. He is also guilty of shameless hyperbole.

He is has compared radio talk yakker Neal Boortz to the character in the movie, "Mr. Holland's Opus" which starred Richard Dreyfuss as a high school music teacher “who tenaciously plodded along the daily grind of teaching music. All the while, he was privately composing his own ‘An American Symphony,’ apparently never to be performed.”

For Towery to even mention Neal Boortz to a school teacher is an insult to every school teacher in Georgia. Boortz has spent his career criticizing “pitiful government schools” without ever having the guts to step out from behind his microphone and explain how he has arrived at that conclusion.

Teachers have enough crap to deal with daily, without having some bully with his own pulpit tearing them down.

Compare him to Brad Pitt or Caesar Augustus or Sheila the Family Wonderdog but don’t ever mention school teachers and Neal Boortz in the same breath.

Towery’s paean comes as Boortz joins the National Radio Hall of Fame, an honor he earned if for no other reason than he shamelessly self-promoted his candidacy to his listeners, urging them to vote for him. And they did. Of course, they would drink battery acid if he told them to. They can be pretty scary

Save the hyperbole for the teacher who does write the opus, who does motivate a young person with no parental support to learn the Periodic Tables, who serves as a sounding board for a kid who doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from, who inspires someone to be the first in their family to go to college, who has some young person come up to them years later and say, “You don’t remember me, but you changed my life,” and who do it in conditions you and I – and Towery and Boortz – wouldn’t dream of doing it because it is easier to pat each other on the back than it is to go make a difference under the conditions in which public teachers do it.

Remember the rejoinder Sen. Lloyd Bentsen made to Dan Quayle during one of their vice presidential debates in 1988 when Quayle compared his experience to John Kennedy? Bentsen said, “I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy."

I know a bunch of Mr. Hollands. They are friends of mine. And, Mr. Towery, Neal Boortz is no Mr. Holland.