I'm normally a night owl, and don't have to expose myself to the blitherings of the right-wing dominated morning talking heads. However, a trip to Europe has set my biological clock back a few hours, and I can no longer dose myself entirely on Olbermann and Maddow -- I'm forced to watch the morning shows. And none of them are watchable. Is it any wonder stay-at-home Moms voted for Bush if this is the political fare they are exposed to (assuming the evening is reserved for entertainment TV)?
I leaped from MSNBC to CNN to (horror!) Fox News, and there was really not a penny's worth difference among them. This morning's menu included: telling McCain his campaign wasn't negative enough, blaming Tina Fey for the fall in McCain's poll numbers, blaming Obama for the fall in the stock market, blaming ACORN thugs for the housing market collapse and massive voter fraud, and even blaming FDR for worsening the Great Depression.
On Fox News, Greg Gutfeld offered the following advice to McCain: It's better to win bitterly than to lose gracefully.
There's more, if you can stand it.
If I turn on the TV in the morning, I usually try "Morning Joe" for a while. But the aggressive pseudo-populist ignorance of Joe Scarborough, combined with the vacuous faux "balance" provided by Mika Brzezinski, always drive me away quickly.
When I tuned in this morning, Joe was raving about how all he had seen on TV in Washington, DC were ads for Obama, and they were relentlessly negative, while McCain had no ads at all. Mika, taking her cue as usual from Joe, since her head remains blissfully thought-free (when not occupied by her anger at Paris Hilton), offered that McCain was not advertising at all in Northern Virginia.
I beg to differ. I live in Northern Virginia, and on whatever channels I was watching, I saw McCain ads in heavy rotation, and they were shockingly negative. In fact, when I first heard his current ad calling Obama a blindly ambitious liar and terrorist crony and blaming Democrats for the subprime mortgage mess, I was anticipating that it would be a RNC ad, since McCain wouldn't link his name to such a blatant attack ad. What was I thinking?
The only bright spots on "Morning Joe" were financial news analyst Dylan Ratigan and, of all things, McCain shill Rick Davis. Ratigan was repeating his mantra that the capitalist system was broken, and risk had been separated from reward so people could just grab money. Rick Davis's ravings turned amusing when, in the midst of defending smear ads, accusing the Obama campaign of racism, and claiming that Democratic rallies were as evil and vindictive as GOP crowds, he referred to Democratic attacks on "John and Sarah McCain". Your Freudian slip is showing, Mr. Davis.
At this point, I switched to Fox & Friends, thinking it couldn't be worse. But of course it could.
I caught the tail end of a story about "ACORN stealing Ohio". Unsurprising, since this story runs approximately 5 times an hour on Fox News, as they try to nurture their Acorn into a big electoral oak. I stayed with Fox, though, because I was hooked by their kicker advertising that Tina Fey had turned the tide against John McCain.
In keeping with their belief in torture, Fox made me sit through several more stories before they got around to blaming Saturday Night Live for the collapse of McCain's campaign. Michelle Malkin, openly sneering at McCain's acknowledgment of Obama's basic human decency, covered a story in an unnamed "British tabloid" alleging strife between McCain and his VP nominee over strategy. (That "tabloid", incidentally, turns out to be the London Times). Malkin, of course, sided with the Sarahcuda in this purported disagreement over attacks on Obama. Said Malkin: "When we ask him to take off the gloves, we don't mean to put on the Hello Kitty mittens!"
A brief weird news (OK, all their news is weird) interlude followed, about "Texting Elephants": actually Kenyan efforts to tag elephants with collars that send alert messages to text phones when the elephants get out of control and stray from their range. Naturally, the Fox anchors questioned their guest, Political Science professor Larry Sabato, about this story, leaving him speechless (and missing a great opportunity to note that these gadgets could have saved the US from rampaging GOP elephants). Sabato was then quizzed on the story I was waiting for, an anticlimax which turned out to be a resurrection of an old Washington Times story, claiming SNL's "unfair" portrayal of Sarah Palin had swayed millions of independent voters against the McCain ticket.
This was as much as I could take of Fox, so I decided to check out CNN. Above a constantly running crawl featuring McCain's vow to "whip" Obama's "you-know-what" (a comment that cries out that "that boy" was just barely suppressed from it), author Amity Shlaes was touting her book "The Forgotten Man" and its thesis that Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal wrecked the American economy and worsened the Depression.
CNN then brought on a right-wing hack, masquerading as an objective observer under the deceptively-named aegis of the "Ethics and Public Policy Center". He is talking about Obama's dangerous radical associations. Is this Stanley Kurtz? I don't know. I don't stay long enough to find out. Time to check MSNBC again.
MSNBC is covering a Wall Street Journal op/ed blaming Obama for the stock market crash (a comment, incidentally, that I'm unable to find on their site).
Enough. I'm swearing off morning TV to write this blog, warning everyone not to watch it.
As I finish this up, Fox News is discussing the Hustler porn parody of Sarah Palin, and whether people might think it was actually Sarah Palin. (Well, people who watch Fox News, perhaps.) They note that Fox News is parodied as "Faux News", which they spell, but are unable to pronounce. Bless their hearts.
It's bad enough when the public is ignorant. It's worse when the news increases their ignorance.