Mea Culpa. It is my wrong-headed custom to leave the television set on MSNBC as background noise throughout the entire day. I don't have an excuse, other than the fact that I think FoxNews is simply a propaganda arm for neo-fascists and CNN has become so amateurish that watching local Eyewitness News broadcasts of freeway accidents is more intellectually stimulating and reliable. That being said, for the last three days now I have been so offended and exasperated by the irresponsible MSNBC partisan assault on Senator Obama that I now feel compelled to demand a thorough and comprehensive examination of their editorial policies and political agenda. It appears to me that, far from reporting events, the producers and personalities of MSNBC are attempting to frame the public debate in a way similar to what we've come to expect from those modern-day Father Coughlins at Fox.
Joe Scarborough, in particular, makes my blood boil! This smug, arrogant and dishonest bully has spent the last three days ranting on about "wine-sipping elites" who neither appreciate nor understand the God-fearing, flag-waving, NASCAR-watching, beer-drinking white men who actually do all the work in this country. They are turning on Barack Obama, Scarborough repeats on the quarter hour for six hours every day.
Well, aside from the irony of this Izod-wearing yuppie of a once-disgraced Congressman presuming to speak for the working man, the real offense here is that his hectoring goes either unchallenged or else is affirmed by a chorus of Willie Geist, Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan.
And the sound bytes of Rev. Wright are used to punctuate every discussion in at least three out of four hourly segments throughout the working day.
Even as I write this diary, Scarborough is on David Gregory's abysmal new show, touting how Obama's comments about his grandmother's being a "typical white person" only serves to reiterate Obama's underlying black anger and identity.
The last three days on MSNBC have constituted a gleeful right-wing wake for the candidacy of Barack Obama, led by Scarborough and underwritten by his posse of Republican hit men.
Who is this self-styled pundit? What is his bona fides to speak for the working man and ridicule the "progressive elites" in such condescending terms?
He attended one of the most elite high schools in the old South: Pensacola Catholic. And he went straight through college and law school, then went straight to Congress. When did he have time to acquaint himself with the working white man?
When he resigned from Congress under something of a cloud, most pundits were writing his political obituary. Now, it appears, the tables are turned.
But it's not the man's character (or lack thereof) which offends me. Although I despise the man's political views, I have always harbored a deep-seated personal affinity for Pat Buchanan because, despite his truly frightening words, he seems authentic and plays by the Marquis of Queensbury rules and refuses to kick a man when he's down. But this respect for the belligerents isn't in the character of people like Joe Scarborough and Rush Limbaugh and all those Gingrichites. They don't know how to debate so much as to hector and browbeat. And once they settle on the party line, they march relentlessly toward their goal like Sherman marched to the sea.
Rather than using the occasion of Obama's speech to engage in an open and useful dialog about race, these low-lifes have once more hidden behind their firewall of American civic religiosity, talking instead about the flag and sedition and "My Country, Right Or Wrong!" And they ring just about as authentic as G.H.W. Bush did in that truly surrealistic scene where he opened his 1988 Acceptance Speech by leading the pledge of allegiance.
Well, perhaps I am not in touch with the working man, despite the fact that my grandfather was Appalachian coal miner and my father was a machinist. Perhaps my college education, which I achieved by dishwashing, hotel clerking and maintenance-working to pay expenses, separated me forever from those real Americans who think Jeff Foxworthy' fart jokes are funny and who think that burning a flag constitutes a lynching offense.
Perhaps I have lost touch because I think Scarborough and Carlson and Hannity and O'Reilly underestimate both the intelligence and the empathy of the white working man in American society.
I keep reminding myself that fewer than one million people watch Olbermann -- the network's highest rated show -- on a daily basis. And almost no one is watching Dan Abrams. Perhaps these nattering nabobs of neo-Nixonianism aren't the threats to the republic (or to the movement which is Barack Obama) that I fear. Perhaps I am just giving them credit for too much cleverness.
But, still, the injustice of all this continues to rankle me. Twenty-four hour news channels seemed like a good idea back in 1980. when CNN simply read the headlines on the half hour and didn't worry too much about drawing in high ratings.
Today, however, aside from Olbermann, there isn't much to commend the efforts of MSNBC, especially when the typical viewer looks forward to Chris Hanson's salacious and exploitative entrapment of stupid internet predators as welcome relief from the day long pontificating of failed Republican pretty boys.
The fault is mine. I can exercise my prerogative to shut the crap off.
And I just did.
God damn MSNBC!