Media Crash

Ha! Big surprise--this administration considers Tim Russert as their boy, which was pretty obvious every time he had one of their number of his NBC-based "Press the Meat" television ass-kissing venue. Under the guise of "hard-hitting" journalist, I can concede Russert asks tough questions. But he falls down in the follow-up nearly every time, as if incapable of anticipating a lie and then challenging effectively. So he has Dick Cheney on, for example, poses what seems a pointed, grilling question, and then, when Cheney out-and-out lies, Russert simply goes on to the next topic rather than saying, "Say what, motherfucker? Don't bullshit me, bald man."

Liberal media, my ass. One of the reasons we're in such a state with regard to Iraq, not to mention just about every other arena, is that the press did not do their job. They should always be challenging the statements of people in power, forcing them to produce the evidence and the reasoning they are using upon it. Instead of being a counterweight to power, they acted as a megaphone for it, and had we not had the alternative media power of the Internet, I shudder to think of how much worse it might have been.

To give the mainstream media their due, it is true that their resources and skills uncover most of the news. They have the means, the money, the expertise, and there are some damned good journalists out there, but the media as a whole has become so beholden to economic interests on the one hand, and the "inside the beltway" press has become so interwoven with the power brokers on the other, that they are now of the same class, with the same interests, and with the same disregard for the general citizenry.

And I wish they would lay off Lindsay Lohan, for chrissakes. Jeez--let the young woman get her shit together. I think she's wonderfully talented. Yes, I do have a weakness for redheads. Is that a crime?

Um, ahem. Sorry. What I mean is that all this obsession for celebrity misdoings just sucks the energy away from stuff that really matters to people's actual lives. Who gives a fuck if two obnoxious media whores like Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell are having a bitch-slapping contest? Actually, that piece by Andy Borowitz is pretty damned funny.

The ongoing feud between Rosie O'Donnell and Donald Trump could have deadly consequences for the world if either obtained nuclear weapons, a group of leading nuclear scientists announced today.

The Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded in 1945 as a publication by nuclear physicists worried about the possibility of nuclear war, expressed their concern about the Rosie-Trump brouhaha by moving the Doomsday Clock forward to three minutes to midnight.

It's Friday. What can I tell you?