Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
CNN Anderson Cooper 360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

In the interests of full disclosure, I am a proud political liberal.

Furtheremore, as a young American Muslim member of the ‘chattering class’ after September 11, it is also pretty safe to say that I have always represented the anti-conservative (and anti-Bush) point of view during my few prodigious years of split-screen television virtual battles thus far on the likes of CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, blah, blah, blah…

Having said that, I would be simply remiss if I did not admit some sadness at the recent news of the death of long-time conservative journalist Robert Novak. Although I never had the honor of being on Crossfire (I was still in law school), his Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson had hosted me several times on his short-lived MSNBC show The Situation with Tucker Carlson .

(That’s one degree of separation, for all of you political Kevin Bacon fans out there…)

But alas, my one life moment with Robert Novak actually took place on a Washington DC city intersection crosswalk one lazy Sunday afternoon a few years back.

Since it was a Sunday, most of downtown DC was completely desolate and I had just walked out of one television studio interview en route to another one a few blocks away. As I neared the closest crosswalk towards the street intersection, I chuckled when I saw one solitary white-haired man waiting at the same crosswalk with his hands in the pockets of his three-piece suit

Read more…