American Patrol

I’ve always tried to avoid the habit of talking to the television screen as if the people on it could actually hear you, a habit that both my father and grandmother indulged in incessantly, and were roundly teased for, when I was growing up. I was thus somewhat surprised this morning to find myself yelling “Who could possibly give a shit?” and “You dumb son of a bitch, what the hell are you thinking?” at David Shuster this morning.

I usually watch the MSNBC and CNN morning news over breakfast, flipping from one to the other to avoid the incessant commercials, and was doing so this morning when I saw the aforementioned Shuster end an otherwise productive interview with former DNC Chair Howard Dean by asking him what his advice would be to Tiger Woods. “Goddamn,” I thought. “What the hell?” I wouldn’t have been more flabbergasted if he’d asked Dr. Dean “If you could be any kind of animal, what animal would you be?”

Deciding to fortify my somewhat shaken brain with another cup of coffee and a Pall Mall on the porch, I returned to the television just in time to hear Shuster conclude his interview with his next guest with the same question. I then made like Dad and Granny for the next several minutes.

Both MSNBC and CNN proceeded to spend what bits of the rest of the morning not taken up with Tiger Woods’ fourteen minute apology to one and all with analysis of same. As usual when I’m watching TV news, I was much less interested in the questions they were considering than on the one they weren’t, which was this: What exactly makes any of this any of our goddamn business, much less a major news story? Role model, my ass—Tiger Woods is a personable if fallible young man who is very good at playing what I consider to be a particularly silly game. If, like John Ensign and Mark Sanford, he had made his career criticizing and attempting to legislate the morality of others, I might actually see the point of bringing up his personal life. Instead, he makes his living hitting a little white ball with a collection of sticks, and I really don’t. In a country in crisis that is fairly brimming with under reported news stories, I marvel at the amount of time and attention wasted on it.

And yes, I know that my recent media kick is starting to resemble Fish shooting at a barrel, and is bringing me dangerously close to qualifying for my own old school KGO award, but jeez, people….

"Evan Bayh has decided to retire. He said he wants to spend more time scolding his family for moving too far to the left."
-- Ezra Klein, Washington Post 2/15/10

Senator Evan Bayh (Vichy D-IN) resigned suddenly yesterday, provoking a rain of bullshit that has resulted in visibility zero conditions in the political media. Bayh, who is probably the most conservative Democrat currently serving in the Senate, is characterized as a "moderate" and a "centrist" who is leaving because of his frustrations with Senate partisanship, giving the dual examples of the seven Senate Republicans who voted against the deficit commission and Harry Reid's scuttling of the bipartisan Baucus/Grassley jobs bill. Democrats, per the media, are stunned, and Republicans looking forward to taking his seat in the fall.

No time, of course, with all this news breaking to wonder whether or not the deficit commission and Baucus/Grassley bill are anything like an appropriate response to the current economic situation, or to wonder how exactly anyone will be able to tell the difference if a genuine Republican took Bayh's place, or to delve any deeper into the origins of Senate gridlock in the Republican strategy of reflexively voting against any and all Democratic initiatives. One typical attempt this morning: MSNBC's Contessa Brewer interviewing Senator Judd Gregg on the topic with nary a mention of his authorship of a widely circulated memo explaining in detail the tactics Senate Republicans could use to obstruct and delay health care reform.

Why bother with facts when you can further narratives? The Horse Race narrative (are Obama and the Dems in trouble?), the antipartisanship narrative (how dare those Democrats try to govern?), and the centrist meme (how bad can things be if a "moderate" like Bayh is bailing out?) are being ram-fed in joyous anticipation of the high drama and boffo ratings of "stunning upsets" in November. Self fulfilling prophecies anyone?

Perfected at last-- news that actually makes you stupider as you watch.

"But if logic wouldn't work
Neither would a magic wand..."
-- Phoebe Snow

Old friendships can pay off in big ways, as I was reminded of again last Thursday when one of my oldest dropped me a line that managed to sum up neatly some of the things that had been rattling around my brain lately. The Turk, who claims to be apolitical but sometimes can't seem to help himself, sent me a Bernie Sanders video and the following: "Suddenly the GOP are all anti-deficit again. Our whole political discourse, if it can be called that, seems to revolve around amnesia. Everything would be so different if the media and its consumers remembered basic stuff dating back as far as, oh let's say three years."

And selah. Notably lacking from the current discussion of the opposition's macroeconomically idiotic anti-deficit mania is the fact ("stupid things," per conservative icon Ronald Reagan) that deficit increases over the last thirty years have occurred preponderantly under Republican administrations, and that they've been in all cases whoppers. The Republicans have practiced a tax cut and spend anyway philosophy as a cornerstone of their something for nothing electoral strategy and their revised standard Clap For Tinkerbell economics.

Selah as well to the media reference. When it is considered news that Senator X said something, but not news that his utterance was stone cold chapter and verse counterfactual, reason itself goes begging.

"It's going to be a great year for Republicans," said David Brooks on this Sunday's Press the Meat, and if he's right, a lot of the reason for it is right there.