- Frank Rich

- N.Y.T., 8/22/10

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html?ref=opinion

As I pointed out yesterday, the things the righties promise have all been done, ad nauseam, and proven repeatedly to be astoundingly stupid and ruinous, but still they tout them as though they were the best things since Vitameatavegamin.  Unless all of their candidates are as yummy as Scott and Sarah, a bunch of Reagan retread ideas, even perfumed with some fresh xenophobia and racism, isn’t exactly going to go over, even with the teabaggers.  The glorious and momentarily uplifting wars, after all these years, have proven to be a big, fat, waste, and worse, they aren’t even good for ratings anymore.  They’ve gotten boring.  If the righties don’t offer something, anything, to their voters except belt-tightening, wars, and tax cuts for the rich, they might even get beaten, by the Democrats, no less.

I wish Democrats understood this.  They wouldn’t have to run by demonizing Republicans if they did anything useful, but since they don’t, oughtn’t they demonize the Republicans, night and day?  After all, they’ve had ample opportunity to see that this strategy works quite well for the Republicans against them.   Alas, no.  Instead, they parrot righty memes and adopt the righty policies the memes support, and throw the game in the first inning. Perhaps the reason the gasbags admire the Republicans so is because if politics is reduced to the sports-like blather to which they routinely consign it, the righties are better players, despite their doughy appearance, and the Democrats are the last ones you’d want on your team.

For a time, they were right, too, as the Bush Administration “Let the Eagle Soar,” as it were.  But the relentless predictions of Republican resurgence the media has touted since 2005 hasn’t occurred yet, and none of its new heroes has ever exactly done anything unpopular.  Yet.  But they will soon, when they cravenly scuttle banking reform and wage pointless battles about extending the Bush tax cuts, bleat for more wars and environmental destruction, and start trying to slash “entitlements,” while the rich they fight for so ruthlessly have meanwhile become almost the only people who eat regularly in the country which they are always threatening to leave.  (see Knight, Phil…)

Call me crazy, but as lame as whatever it is the Dems are going to offer, it won’t be nearly as bad as what the righties come up with, and that problem will assuredly surface as we head into the fall, although it will come as a total surprise to David Gregory.  Even, and perhaps especially, in Televisionland you need to have a product to sell, and the Republicans don’t have it.  They have Liz Cheney and Glenn Beck’s chalkboards, and it goes downhill from there.  Good luck with that.

The Democrats deserve to lose, but I just don’t think the Republicans are going to let them.

I have a yellowed clipping on my bulletin board from a few years ago wherein a NYT reader says that the reason there are so few “conservative” academics is that, “Academics look at evidence and come to conclusions.  Today’s conservatives start with a conclusion and then try to find anything to support that conclusion, regardless of contrary evidence.  Their arguments fall apart under the lightest scrutiny.”   The writer only left out, “then comes the shouting.”  Thus was the case with the talented Mr. O’Keefe.  Conservatives were beside themselves that ACORN was registering voters who, in sufficient numbers, would spell their doom, so they decided that ACORN needed to be silenced.  A “sting” was ordered.  Out of nowhere, a demonstrably unhinged but unalterably committed schoolboy was found, funded, and sent around the country to stage video that, properly edited and hyped, could get rid of ACORN, once and for all, and thereby at least temporarily forestall the GOP’s imminent demographic demise.  As luck would have it, there was already a huge infrastructure of right-wing “journalism” in place to mindlessly promote O”Keefe’s “work,” and better yet, to once again intimidate what remained of the mainstream media into covering his “revelations,” regardless of whether they had been deliberately manipulated or were outright false.  Everybody, including Congress, fell for it, and to the casual observer, it appeared that O”Keefe had found a “scoop” that the hapless liberal media had either missed or consciously ignored.  The subsequent court cases that largely exonerated ACORN were lost in the shuffle, and no one ever thought to ask how, why, or with whose money O”Keefe got his expose.  Win, win.

Flush with this “success,” Breitbart obviously ate a bunch more doughnuts while O’Reilly and the lesser Foxes waited with bated breath for the next O’Keefe blockbuster.  Money obviously changed hands, as we are belatedly discovering, Republican pols and operatives were duly enlisted, and these overconfident propagandists decided, based on past success, to up the ante.  Oops.  The fuzz showed up this time.  Waxing Nixonian, all the establishment righty mouthpieces quickly distanced themselves from this “prank,” or “third-rate burglary,” as RN would have put it, and instead went bananas over any small mistake made by the MSM in reporting it, and started yelling incoherently.  Why not?  It worked before, and it may well again.

Thus, the whole point of this new phenomenon of right-wing “journalism,” which is to destroy and discredit the very idea of truth , has bumped up against the final barrier to its dominance, the criminal justice system, and it’s quite obvious that they are resorting to the usual misdirection and lies to get out of this unaccustomed pickle.  I myself had a Breitbartian exchange with a righty mouth-breather at FDL over the last day or so, who, like Breitbart, repeatedly demanded that I document where, get this, Michelle Malkin had specifically lied about the teabugger incident in her hurried, ad hoc denunciation of O’Keefe.  Never mind the many well-documented and ethically dubious political missions of either miscreant; like the Bush defenders of yore who demanded “proof” of how Bush and Cheney had “personally profited” from their wars and other flagrant shenanigans, insisting that anything short of bank statements would prove all critics to be garden-variety liberal liars, I must somehow “prove” some specific lie, or shut up, but fast.  The burden of proof, you know, belongs not to the initial lying loudmouth and his/her many media outlets, but to the obscure blogger who asks a few questions.

The success of this venture can hardly be understated.  A political movement that is inherently unpopular, focused as it is on harming the many for the benefit of the few, has to get creative, and it certainly has.  The hated “liberal media” is hopelessly cowed, along with the political class, and, as long as the cops don’t show up, they have a good thing going, and a few Presidents and Supreme Court Justices notched in their otherwise unblemished bed posts.  What they aren’t, and never will be, is Journalists, and the truth, despite O”Keefe’s desperate and probably illegal tweets, will never set them free.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

UPDATED BELOW:

Well, I fully expected this to be a rather depressing day, what with the President’s concession speech ahead, but boy, oh, boy, did it turn out differently.  First, Measures 66 and 67 passed by a veritable landslide, at last count 54-46, and a lot of obnoxious rich people will have to make good on their threats to leave.  Yay!  I know Phil Knight will just love living in Washougal, Washington, since I once wanted to live there myself, when I was a kid and noticed that they get a whole lot of snow days.  FreedomWorks, Dick Armey, and the whole clown car of national anti-tax people converged on little old Oregon to clobber the modest tax increases on corporations and the rich, and still came up snake eyes.  In addition to writing what was quite possibly the most illiterate and unpersuasive op/ed the Oregonian has ever run, (and that’s saying something…) Nike gazillionaire Phil Knight pissed away over $300,000 of his own ill-gotten gains, or roughly 5000% of what the taxes would have cost him from now until death, and lost.  I find myself questioning my atheism, all of a sudden.

The best part of this is that Multnomah County, the most reliably liberal county in Oregon that includes central Portland, had very poor turnout, and the soundness of the teabagger defeat was therefore secured by the ambivalence of the conservative areas of the state, where the measure failed to gain the usual almost unanimous opposition.  The swing counties were overwhelmingly in favor of the measures, despite the Oregonian’s jihad against them, and their opponents were forced to whine about being outspent by “the unions,” for a change.  This time, nobody believed the righty trope that rich people and corporations are the fountain of prosperity, perhaps because they aren’t, and better yet either didn’t care or didn’t believe that they would really up and leave.   If I were FreedomWorks, I’d be as nervous as a whore in church.  This kind of thing could catch on, and if it did, where would the rich go?  Somalia?  Let ‘em.  Send me a postcard.

Then, the “teabuggers,” about whom I wrote yesterday, started dragging down Andrew Breitbart, FOX News, and every other righty who kissed their pimply asses in Macy’s window for months, not by anything they said or did, but merely by exposing the cravenness and stupidity of their media enablers for the whole world to see.  On the supposedly “safe” venue of Hugh Hewitt’s righty talk show, Breitbart accidentally let slip that head-teabugger O’Keefe was on his payroll; the opposition from David “diapers” Vitter to Sen. Mary Landrieu’s pick for a new Louisiana US Attorney started to collapse in a wave of revelations about a typical Republican coverup; and ACORN is now probably O’Keefe’s only hope to be able to vote again when he gets out of jail, since they have worked so hard in the past for the re-enfranchisement of ex-felons.

Anyway, these rather delightful and interesting developments ought to take the edge off whatever infuriating nonsense comes out of our Commander in Chief this evening, at least for me, even though I have little doubt that he will fail to mention either of them, since they both point to the criminality and unpopularity of the opponents to whom he plans to capitulate.  Thus the drinking game is still on.

But here in Oregon, and down in Louisiana, it’s looking like Obama is the only one who believes that the teabaggers run the country.

UPDATE: Phil Knight, in an interview with fellow anti 66 and 67 activist rag the Oregonian, backtracked on his threats to move to Wyoming, or somesuch. He said “Nike is too big”  (not like his firecrotch penis) to leave the state, and even he himself wasn’t planning to move to Washougal, much to the delight of Clark County residents, no doubt.  Not wanting to admit what a lying sack of sh*t he was so soon after the election, he merely said he was “keeping my options open.”  Please, Phil, keep them open.  You could use a few more snow days.

Anyway, O’Keefe was so tied up in trying to become the next Octomom, that he didn’t bother with checking into the potential ten-year sentence such a crime carries, and was able to round up three other geniuses, one of whom is the son of Republican US Attorney William Flanagan, to dress up as telephone repairmen and blunder into a federal office building and… get this…  when questioned, say they left their credentials “in the van.”  Or something.  Why not?  They had hard hats and tool belts, and even a fluorescent vest or two.  They never suspected, apparently, that sometimes FBI agents are lurking around such places, and that’s where their troubles began.

The best part of this is that now all the right-wing media, from Michelle Malkin to Pajamas Media, are sniffily tut-tutting such amateurish pranks, not because they suddenly realize O’Keefe has been a fraud all along, but because they realize what damage this could do to their own, uh, credibility.  By evening, expect FOX to have declared the whole thing part of an Islamofascistcommielibrulmedia conspiracy to silence the latest, greatest “investigative reporter” the right has yet to produce.  You see, up until this afternoon, O’Keefe was considered a shoo-in to win CPAC’s “prestigious (!) Reagan Award,” for his ACORN “exposes,” and Andrew Breitbart and the whole FOX lineup had hailed him as the second coming of… something.  That sort of fatuous adulation can go to your bony head if you’re a righty twit that has long since given up on getting laid any other way.

Well, O’Keefe’s chances of scoring won’t improve, at least in the way he’d like, in federal prison, and O’Reilly, Breitbart, et al are going to have a tougher and tougher time finding anyone so audaciously  stupid and addlepated to do their “work”  for them in the future.  Even more hilariously, this bunch is bringing up Nixon’s similar but comparatively professional shenanigans, something that had slipped their minds for the last decade or so as Bush indulged in nearly all of them.  Pat Buchanan, he of the proposed Brookings Institution firebombings back in the day, was even brought on to chat with Chris Matthews to share his “expertise” in this drearily familiar area of Republican politics  (Again, h/t sysprog…).

It’s funny…  Even as the Democrats squander their mandate kowtowing to Republican memes, methods, and propaganda, the Republicans manage to go them one better and remind us all what pathetic and lawless authoritarians they are, and we are once again reminded how shoddy reporting, questionable means, and zero fact-checking can blow up in the pancaked faces of our idiotic media when they shower ridiculously obvious charlatans with undeserved adulation and celebrity, solely because the targets are supposedly “liberal,” and conservatives can do no wrong.

Won’t someone on the right “please think of the children?”  One of yours just got left behind.  Big time.

Dark Horizon

UPDATED BELOW:

I continue to be haunted by the right-wing BS I encountered at OregonLive yesterday, and the stunning success it represents in recruiting committed followers to some of the most reprehensible and elitist ideas ever conceived, all in the name of a twisted and yes, Hitlerian “populism.”  Reagan may have been a doddering old fool in many ways, but getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine was one of his masterstrokes, and its legacy poisons our politics, destroys the very concept of  e pluribus unum, and leaves us in the mess we find ourselves today.  No wonder crypto-fascists like Sean Hannity et al are so afraid it could return.  Because he and all of his ilk rely on a fact-free bubble of lies and smears for their political success, they recognize its demise as their very own Enabling Act, and its return would be their VE Day.

Right-wing radio and Fox News could not exist within the strictures of the Fairness Doctrine, and for good reason.  Americans saw the power to inoculate people to the most heinous and repressive of governments made possible by the media manipulations of Goebbels and Reifenstahl, and that immediacy and manipulative power of Radio and film were key to their rise to power.  Just like Hate Radio and FOX, the Nazis appealed to the darkest but most powerful and tribal elements of human nature… and found that lies, repeated often enough, were especially effective if they chose outsiders and minorities as scapegoats, and equated military conquest, violence, and racism with national pride and glory.  The Nuremberg Trials revealed how well evil could become banal, and accepted, if it was relentlessly touted through the media.  At the time, newspapers were still plentiful enough that with a few ownership restrictions might be left alone, but the limited spectrum of radio and television left America open to the fate of Germany in the 1930′s, and the Fairness Doctrine grew out of that understandable fear.  Big Brother wasn’t just a fantasy in those days, and it was well understood that opposing viewpoints were critical in keeping Big Brother away from a screen or speaker near you.

Just as those hard lessons of that moment in history were lost when Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, and an economic crash quickly and inevitably followed, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine led to the place we find ourselves in today.  Fascism is back, broadcasting 24/7, with the same nativism, bloodlust, worship of authority and military conquest, wrapped up, just as predicted, “wrapped in the flag and carrying a Cross.”

Then as now, economic hardship has turned Americans hard and vengeful, and Hitler’s old targets: unions, academics, gays, minorities, liberals, and more enlightened countries are trotted out to be flogged for the disaster.  Then as now, the wealthy, the well-connected, and the largest industries (not incidentally including the deregulated media) are happy to get on board.  And then as now, the goal is not to attempt to solve problems through dialogue and compromise, but to eliminate, by whatever means necessary, any and all dissent from the programs chosen by the amoral and self-serving elite.

I was in Journalism school in the early 80′s when the Fairness Doctrine was being discussed, and ironically, my professor, Lauren Kessler, didn’t see its demise as a bad thing.  In her liberal naivete, she mused that objectivity was unattainable anyway, so why not let journalists express their views in the open?  Just a few years after Watergate and the Church Commission hearings, she evidently thought that liberal ideas would win in the marketplace of ideas, so why not let a thousand flowers bloom?  I was inclined to agree, because I felt that Reagan’s destructive policies were being given undue credence because journalists had to present them alongside more sane proposals.  Neither of us saw that a lot of wealthy conservatives were poised and at the ready to “invest” in a big way in the media, to bend it to their will once and for all.  When the Fairness Doctrine finally fell, Rupert Murdoch and the people who would eventually build Clear Channel, Sinclair Broadcasting, and on and on, didn’t waste a moment, and the results will go down in the history books as an unmitigated triumph for the Right in selling, once again, its discredited ideas.

Thanks to the end of the Fairness Doctrine, racism is not only cool again, but has been redefined as an affliction only of uppity brown people.  Torture is back, and better than ever.  Rich people pay less taxes, and are even admired for their selfishness and greed.  War is accepted as a permanent state of affairs, with all its crippling costs and questionable aims.  Due process and fair trials are tossed aside as lightly as that Big Mac wrapper, and new, usually violent, pogroms against any dissenter, political or religious, are  dreamed up and sold like soap each day.  Working people’s wages and power have been systematically destroyed by the demonization of unions, and everything from schools to bridges are denounced as “socialist” intrusions on the “Free Market,” which is whatever the rich and powerful say it is.

None of this would have been conceivable just a few decades ago, and now, even a President of the nominally “liberal” party is powerless to reverse any of it.  Rest in peace, “Fairness Doctrine.”  You were our last chance, and we blew it.

UPDATE: I take no pleasure in announcing this, but as I predicted last week, we now have a centerfold teabagger in Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.  Thanks for the bipartisanship, Obama.  I claim no clairvoyance, only that if a liberal utopian like myself doesn’t give a shit at this point, why should the denizens of the Bay State?  If Rahm, Geithner and Summers survive this, the Democratic party won’t.

Nixon was understandably mistrustful of television after the catastrophic 1960 debates with Kennedy, but the former “Mike Douglas Show” producer was able to convince him that TV could be his friend, especially if the reality was drained out of it.  Thus, 30 years before Bush’s fake town hall participants were handed their fake questions, with Ailes’ help Nixon was able to artificially manufacture the warmth and spontaneity he congenitally lacked through staged “discussions” with carefully chosen “citizens,” which began his improbable path to victory in 1968.  And we all know how that turned out.

Although it’s impossible to determine what Ailes’ real ideology is (besides making money) he decided, somewhat audaciously at the time, that news didn’t have to be, well, news, but merely had to play it on TV, and he honed his skills at this dubious endeavor for Republicans ever after, culminating in his creation of a whole news network dedicated to deception through newscasts when he joined Rupert Murdoch to conjure up FOX News.

Like Nixon, Murdoch was a shabby opportunist who was widely disliked in his field, for good reason, and like Nixon, he was convinced that the problem was with everyone else, not him.  Unlike Nixon, he was also insanely wealthy, and whatever he lacked in ethics and decency he was prepared to paper over with loads of  cash from the empire he’d built on his inheritance.  Sleazy politicians come and go, but sleazy global media empires are forever, and Murdoch was more than willing to spend big to re-educate the world to his way of thinking for the long term.  Thus, the architect of Nixon’s Southern Strategy was handed a golden opportunity to take his deceitful and misanthropic show on the road.

Of course, Murdoch had no intention of aping the despised liberal media by doing any enterprise reporting, setting up expensive bureaus, or hiring actual journalists; that would potentially have let inconvenient reality seep in and worse, waste money.  As Ailes knew from his long experience wooing the stupid and resentful, all that was required was the trappings of a newsroom populated by convincing-looking talking heads to fool this bunch.  Better yet, such grave inadequacies could actually be a selling point to a target audience that was as fond of objective reality as the Wicked Witch of the West was fond of a bucket of water.  ”Fair and Balanced” would become code for “don’t confuse me with the facts,” and pure hype and nonsense dreamed up for political effect would actually be preferable to the dreary old facts produced by the hard work of journalism.

After a few hundred million dollars was expended handing out content for free and attempting to bring down the hated Democratic President, FOX finally got everything it wanted in its dream candidate, George W. Bush, and that’s when things started going down hill, even as ratings and profits soared.  The audience demanded more, even after Bush’s insane policies had trashed the economy and brought about a string of crushing and deserved defeats for the Republicans… and Murdoch and Ailes were determined to keep feeding the beast, which had grown like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” with similar appetites.  The hideous reality that FOX had helped to create kept rearing its ugly head, and keeping the audience distracted was getting more and more difficult.  First the reliably flaccid but obviously correct Colmes had to be tossed off Hannity’s show; then the demented and disturbing Glenn Beck was brought in from CNN, which was busily washing its hands of the Bush era, to, among other things, boil (fake, natch…) frogs on the air and draw misspelled but seemingly heartfelt graffiti on his chalk board about Hitler, Stalin, and whatever else came to mind.

Finally, the carefully crafted artifice of even being a “news” organization had to be dropped altogether; fake videos, blatant political organizing, and hilarious staging of news footage was routinely caught on tape, and the crowds, rather than leaving the theater in disgust, wanted more.  Enter Sarah Palin.

Now, the monkey cage that FOX has become is on display for all the world to see, and just like the party it relentlessly fetishizes, looks more and more cuckoo to the outside world as it flings its poo and unashamedly touches itself in unseemly places.  Members of the Murdoch family have been moved even to risk their fat dividend checks from the notoriously vindictive Rupert by publicly declaring their embarrassment, and then Ailes rocks the boat by giving a rather impertinently self-aggrandizing interview to the hated New York Times about his genius.

Murdoch, having created this monster, has reached the unhappy moment that ABC once did with “Happy Days” after Fonzie famously jumped the shark.  What next?

At first, I was somewhat mystified to find that the lead story everywhere is the Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien “controversy,” evidently involving which overpaid muppet will bore audiences at which hour.  As a non-television watcher, I don’t know or care who these cretins are or once were; one looks like a superannuated drag queen sans makeup, the other is a washed up 80′s flash-in-the-pan whose appeal or “humor” utterly escapes me.  Aren’t looks about the only qualification left for being on television?  If so, no wonder broadcast TV is about to be sold off on Ebay.  Then I realized that, like Nicole Kidman’s character in “To Die For, ” (who was at least pretty…) the only thing these people care about is their own camera time, and they foolishly think that we, the people, must  be similarly obsessed.

It got even weirder when intrepid journalists Bill O’Reilly and Brit Hume got together to discuss the earth-shattering news that half-term former Governor and failed VP candidate Sarah Palin’s was unsurprisingly hired by FOX, that rather luxurious and certainly reliable rest home for all Republican failures.  Both agreed it was a great move for her; they know better than anybody that the place to be if you’re a narcissistic pathological liar is FOX News.  Predictably, though, they wondered almost aloud whether it was such a good move for FOX, (meaning them, natch…) failing to disguise the fact that she had both of them beat, hands down, in the looks department and might therefore someday push them from their  padded perches, especially if she learned to speak English convincingly.

But the cherry on top of the infotainment sundae had to be the breathless and unrelenting hype about something (I hesitate to call it a book) called “Game Change,” which might be more accurately titled, “How We Could Have Made the 2008 Election Even Stupider.”  Here, sorority journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann finally let loose from the boring old journalistic standards to which they unaccountably felt themselves tied back then, and they eagerly tell the story of the long past election as it was meant to be told, minus all policy, minus all perspective, and best of all minus all people who are unlucky enough to reside on the wrong side on the cameras.  Claws out and painted in lurid jungle red, these venomous vixens have published 400-odd pages of irrelevant garbage which, as Hill columnist Brent Budowsky said on Ed Schultz’s radio today, “matters to about 1000 people.”  Or less.  But as Halperin and his fellow Mean Girl Heilemann know, on TV these are the only 1000 people who matter.  The rest of America got blackballed at Rush Week. (No pun intended…)

Have we finally arrived at the moment where we only tune into TV “news” to find out about the soap opera amongst its participants that has gradually become more familiar than the “news” it was once supposed to cover?  Will all politicians have to be married to, or at least sleeping with, a media star to get any airtime at all?  Or will they all just quit pretending to be public servants, and just  wear pancake night and day, like Sarah Palin and the many who preceded her?

And, as Nicole Kidman’s more sane foil asked her character in “To Die For,” “If everyone’s on television, who will be left to watch?”

- John Major, former British prime minister, commenting on former prime minister Tony Blair’s recent admission that, even without weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, the 2003 invasion of Iraq by US and UK forces was justified

- The Guardian, 2/2/10

Yes, cocktailhag.com fans, it’s the first annual Name The Bad Guy Contest, in which you, our commenters, rack your brains to come up with the definitive list of bad guys around the world and in all walks of life.

Don’t just limit your picks to bad guys in politics!   No!  Widen the field and, with some semblance of reasoning, put up a bad guy who meets the everyday standard of, well - just being a bad guy!

Let’s get started.  I’ll kick things off and you jump in when the urge strikes.

So, Sir John said Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, but he didn’t think Sadddam was a bad enough guy to be knocked from his golden throne by force because he didn’t have WMD that could be bolted on top of a rocket, and then fired at London with a 45 minute ETA, as Tony Blair believed.  So is Sir John saying Blair is a bad guy for getting it so wrong, or for being willing to get along by going along with George Bush?  Oh, and then, does all this mean W. was a bad guy?  Ya think?

Who are all the bad guys as we look around and try to get firm footing on the bridge to the 21st century?

How about Tiger Woods?  Should we invade golf courses from now on and keep him from sullying the game for lying about sex and being a meta hypocrite about marriage?

How about Nevada Senator John Ensign, who is willing to blow smoke into the face of a national television audience for six minutes about his sexual adventures and possible conflict of interest as a senator on matters related to his sexual adventures?  Should we invade Nevada and remove him from office?

Is Glenn Beck a bad guy for shedding faux tears on Fox News?  Should we invade Fox News headquarters in New York and remove this embarrassment to American journalism once and for all?

There are so many bad guys to choose from!

Let’s hear from you.

In response to the well-deserved disrepute our media has so richly earned from the public for such unforgivable lameness, the solution has not been to improve quality and try not to misinform so, but rather to bring in new “talent” to serve up the same old swill.  Fortunately for, say, David Gregory, the media defines “talent” rather loosely.  Unfortunately for the long-suffering news consumer, the trajectory of “talent” is always downward; witness the NYT’s slide from Safire to Brooks to Kristol to Douthat…  who’s next, Drudge?  Britney Spears?  The LA Times dropped Robert Scheer to make room for Jonah Goldberg’s substantial bulk, and look how that turned out.  Desperate measures make for desperate times, but count on these lame rags to blame Y2K or el nino for their troubles.

Over at FOX, the dilemma was a little different, as you’d expect.  But media-savvy little Rovettes that they are there, they knew they needed something big to appeal to that ever elusive under-70 crowd; Bill O’Reilly was too sober, and as Murdoch himself said, maybe Hannity was a bit “academic.”  Enter Glenn Beck stage right, and then some.  Now, as Q-ratings go, you wouldn’t think Beck would have been the most obvious choice; he’s pasty and pudgy, beady eyed and dumb-looking, and his voice sounds like Richard Simmons without the “accent.”  Besides which, he’s utterly uneducated, bereft of any journalistic experience, and, well, to call him histrionic would be like calling Ann Coulter “outgoing.”  But therein lies the Beck magic; the “rodeo clown” FOX needed to reel in younger dumb people, and as a bonus, to make the network’s universally abysmal “journalism” look almost respectable by comparison.  Win, win.

In such an post-journalism environment , it was inevitable that Sarah Palin’s high heels would come clicking onto the stage.  Since nobody was asking any questions anyway, why wouldn’t a politician not bother to have any answers, even scribbled on a 3 x 5 card like Reagan used to?  That gal can just waltz onto any FOX show and say something like this:

“Scares me the road that he [President Obama] has us on, not seeming to understand what it is that built up America’s economic system, the free enterprise principles, the shrinkage of government, not the expansion to allow the private sector to grow and to thrive and to do what it does best and our families keep more of what they earned, so that they can reinvest and prioritize instead of government doing it for them, which is a step towards socialism. So some of the steps we’re taking economically right now scare the heck out of me.”

I’m scared too, mostly that that woman has a driver’s license, but to Bill O’Reilly, that speech was all but Churchillian.  He was no doubt too busy loofah-ing her in his mind to notice the tumbleweeds behind her eyes, but honestly.  He may think his audience is dumb, but surely they speak English?  Disturbingly, the answer is probably yes, since Palin finished up thusly:

“. . . what Reagan did . . . he boiled it all down to this. He looked at our enemies, enemies around the world, and he said, we win, you lose. That’s what I want to see and feel and hear from our new administration, from President Obama.”

Alrighty, then.  You can just imagine that over in the next studio, Glenn Beck’s Red Phone to the President is ringing off the hook, offering her the cabinet-level position of Queen of the Department of Law.  Or something.

Please….  If politics is going to henceforth be a talent show, would it be too much to ask that it contain some, uh, talent?