more on the insipid american media...

Back when Tim Russert died, my brother sent me an email asking me my thoughts &/or feelings on the passing of the alleged icon. Sorry to my brother for I ripped him a new porthole, sputting my yellow, mucusy bile across my laptop screen in the process (in case you ever wanted to borrow it) over the likes of Tim F'ing Russert. Of course everybody just lovvvved Tim Russert -- low-information lovers, they -- where even my Mom could no longer tolerate another of my frothings without furiously pointing the TV remote at me and jamming on the mute button.

And as the email had more than a few cc's, most of the recipients were rendered begging to be taken off the exchange. I guess I'd rather be right than president.

Anyhow, I'm glad I'm not alone in my contempt for Russert and/or the rest of the D.C. gang of too many insipid pundits. Jerry and Joe Long give aid (h/t to Greenwald):

What would Tim think? Gee Brian that's a toughy...he'd probably think what you think and Stephanopoulos thinks and Gibson thinks and Brokaw thinks and Couric thinks and Blitzer thinks...you know...somewhere safely inside the parameters of debate. Maybe for divergent views there'd be a round-table with David Broder drooling fossilized idiocy and Jon Meacham spouting biblical idiocy and Matalin and Carville encapsulating idiocy at the genetic level.

Meanwhile, Richard Cohen likes the Joe Biden pick because he saw John McCain dance with Jill Biden "on the terrace of the sublime Villa d'Este on the shore of Italy's stunning Lake Como." If Hunter Thompson were alive he would kill himself again.

Well, there y'go. I feel less insane now, thanky.

another one bites the dust...

Tim Russert: 1950-2008

I see NBC is going wall2wall with Russert's passing, he who was, apparently, the Pope; and this, a further illustration of what an inbred industry corporate news television really is.

Yeah, yeah! Russert appealled to middle America, suffering the Buffalo Bills as their highest profile fan. Hell! My mother loved him, the poor dear. He was a giant within and to his cabal of 24-hour news-jabberers -- got all that!

But, please, let us also not forget his complicity in the Bush Wars propaganda; Valerie Plame, etc., or, more simply, his forever giving aid & comfort to vice president Joseph Stal... er, Dick Cheney.

tim russert: hack... !

Back in the spring of '89, I was offered a summer internship at Meet The Press. At the time it was hosted by Garrick Utley, a substantive and admirable successor to the show's icon Lawrence Spivac, and was even then the longest running news show in America. Instead I took the offer with Washington's local NBC affiliate News4, which provided me the opportunity to become acquainted with a then relatively unknown field reporter named Katie Couric.

But now Meet The Press is met with universal derision within the progressive movement, precisely because it's host Tim Russert is what Arianna Huffington says he is, a "conventional wisdom zombie":

[I]f he truly thinks his show hasn't become an outlet for Bush administration figures to push their message uncontested (as Huffington suggests), then shouldn't he bring Huffington on and challenge her assertions? Or, at the very least, allow Huffington to go on another NBC show?

Probably not, since that would mean Russert would have to ask tough questions for a change.

It says here that any reference to a "liberal media" is likely offered by the ignorant or one with a right-wing agenda.

after *american idol*, you mean... ?

Must Watch 2night!!

Barry Yourgrau wonders why (not) this was all the NYTimes had to say about it:

9 P.M. (PBS) BUYING THE WAR The season premiere of "Bill Moyers Journal" examines the proposition that the news media were complicit in pushing the United States into the war in Iraq. Dan Rather, Tim Russert and Bob Simon appear in interviews.

seinfeld's eulogy of carlin...

Originally published in the NYTimes, I thought it brilliant. Just re-read it and still do.

Dying Is Hard. Comedy Is Harder.
By JERRY SEINFELD
Published: June 24, 2008

THE honest truth is, for a comedian, even death is just a premise to make jokes about. I know this because I was on the phone with George Carlin nine days ago and we were making some death jokes. We were talking about Tim Russert and Bo Diddley and George said: “I feel safe for a while. There will probably be a break before they come after the next one. I always like to fly on an airline right after they’ve had a crash. It improves your odds.”

I called him to compliment him on his most recent special on HBO. Seventy years old and he cranks out another hour of great new stuff. He was in a hotel room in Las Vegas getting ready for his show. He was a monster.

You could certainly say that George downright invented modern American stand-up comedy in many ways. Every comedian does a little George. I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve been standing around with some comedians and someone talks about some idea for a joke and another comedian would say, “Carlin does it.” I’ve heard it my whole career: “Carlin does it,” “Carlin already did it,” “Carlin did it eight years ago.”

And he didn’t just “do” it. He worked over an idea like a diamond cutter with facets and angles and refractions of light. He made you sorry you ever thought you wanted to be a comedian. He was like a train hobo with a chicken bone. When he was done there was nothing left for anybody.

But his brilliance fathered dozens of great comedians. I personally never cared about “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” or “FM & AM.” To me, everything he did just had this gleaming wonderful precision and originality.

I became obsessed with him in the ’60s. As a kid it seemed like the whole world was funny because of George Carlin. His performing voice, even laced with profanity, always sounded as if he were trying to amuse a child. It was like the naughtiest, most fun grown-up you ever met was reading you a bedtime story.

I know George didn’t believe in heaven or hell. Like death, they were just more comedy premises. And it just makes me even sadder to think that when I reach my own end, whatever tumbling cataclysmic vortex of existence I’m spinning through, in that moment I will still have to think, “Carlin already did it.”

of flag pins & the like...

The question you'll never hear Tim Russert ask John McCain:

Audience member: This question goes to mental health and mental health care. Previously, I've been married to a woman that was verbally abusive to me. Is it true that you called your wife a (expletive)?

McCain: Now, now. You don't want to... Um, you know that's the great thing about town hall meetings, sir, but we really don't, there's people here who don't respect that kind of language. So I'll move on to the next questioner in the back.

Goes to credibility and character, yerronner.

And how 'bout that slide step by the pitcher?

Take It To The Bank

R.J. Eskow has an interesting take on the apparent metamorphisis of Al Gore's personna and the prospect of his running again for president, comparing it to the primer How To Pick Up Girls:

Many guys put too much emphasis on learning "lines" and "techniques" when they are first starting down the path to success with women ... but the truth is you won't achieve the massive success you desire until it comes from inside of you. You should be totally detached from the "outcome" of any situation with a woman. What that means is that no matter what she says or does, your life goes on the same way. If a woman rejects you, it is no big deal. If a woman goes home with you, it is also no big deal. Try to become the guy who doesn't care either way. This attitude of indifference is magnetically attractive to women.

The same seems to be true of politicians. If winning and losing aren't important to you anymore, if they're just a laugh line ("I used to be your next President"), you become confident, self-contained, and attractive. The key is to be someone, autonomous and integrated, independent of the office you seek.

Be all this as it may, Al Gore will run for president in '08; not only because this bit of psychology is dead-on, but the question inexorably boils down to what Al Gore wants. Presumably it's to correct the misdirection toward environmental disaster into which the world is being steered. And he can only be thinking, "If not Al Gore, then who?"

Who indeed can make America kick its addiction for oil, and with it its massively destructive manifestations? Certainly not the Republicans. They've revealed themselves to be the impediment and not the solution.

Hillary? Are you kidding? Hillary's answer for cleaner air is to ban the burning of flags, what with all the carbon gasses they release into the atmosphere. I mean, c'mon!!

Al Gore knows this, and the Guardian, too, has its suspicions:

It is significant, however, that Mr Gore refuses to go beyond saying that he has no "plans" for such a campaign. "I haven't made a Shermanesque statement because it just seems odd to do so," he has said - a reference to the famous announcement by the civil war general William Sherman, who unequivocally refused to stand in the election of 1884. "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve," General Sherman said.

Gore is keeping his powder dry, he knows the American M$M is stilted toward corporate interests, and Gore's campaign to fight Global Warming is anathema to... say, for example, General Electric, owner of NBC -- it, with its slew of chattering righties like Chris Matthews, Tucker Carlson, Tim Russert and Joe Scarborough; all of them, itching to trot out the same old crap about Gore's alleged eccentricities, and as preemptively as they can, even as they now slice & dice his movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Meanwhile, Hillary plays kissy-face with Rupert, and the bet here is Faux News will correspondingly fade out its "Get Hillary" reporting just as it sharpens its re-slander coverage of Gore.

The point being, Gore's playing cagey for a very good reason -- but he will run. He has to. Nobody else can or will do the job only he is in position to do, that is championing the Earth's physical salvation. . . and while doing so, releasing America from the choke-hold as applied by the Oligarchy.

Arianna: The Neo Gray Lady

To think Al Franken once referred to her as "The beautiful but very evil Arianna Huffington"... Is there a better daily publication, on-line or on the newsstands, than The Huffington Post? When it comes to effectively casting grappling hooks in order to haul down the towering but darkly corrupt Gullivers of our time, Huffington goes for the jugular, be it Tim Russert's of Meet The Press or Arthur Sulzberger's and his New York goddamn Times:

It’s pathetic, really. And wildly counterproductive. For far from rallying support for Miller, today’s pitiable plea instead calls attention to how little support for Miller there actually is… even among the Times’ own op-ed columnists. Not one of them has written a single word about their incarcerated colleague during the entire month of August[.]

I'm looking forward to the day when Judy Miller is released from the slammer. I suspect she'll be expecting garlands and cheers, when, out of the sea of microphones and flashing bulbs, someone, not buying into the Joan of Arc routine Miller will inevitably be attempting to project, and ask, "Did you sleep with Ahmad Chalabi?"

"How about Karl Rove?"

"Has your husband returned from La Cote D'Azur yet... ?"

What was that line in RoboCop... ? Ah yes...

"I'd buy that for a dollar!"