For a whole day, all anyone in the news could talk about was a big empty bag of air, floating around the country side, promising an exciting and heroic story, but delivering instead the insane ramblings of a shameless attention whore and one of the world's worst parents.
And yet you'd have thought they'd learned their lesson from that balloon boy thing a few weeks ago.
And if it hadn't been for the release of "Sarah, Palin and Tall (tales)" or whatever it's called, the news would still be doing thermogeokinetic analyses of Obama's Japanese bow. By now, Glen Beck would have a panel of Japanese "experts" all agreeing that Obama's bow was actually sign-kanji for "Where can I buy the most Marxist sushi to eat with my arugula?".
Wolf Blitzer would be analyzing Glen's panel and asking the hard-nosed fact-seeking middle of the road questions - "Is it arugula, or croissant? Are croissant's French, Muslim, or a bit of both? etc."
The "Young Republicans", who created the Youtube sensation "Douchebag Bromance" (I think that's what it was called), would be releasing a dance video where they dress up as "Chinamen" and bow to Carrie Prejean.
And somewhere, amidst these colossally unimportant stories, there'd be little glimpses of the healthcare bill, now in its home stretch.
Far be it from me to speculate about the inner workings of the Obama strategy room, but I'm beginning to wonder if there wasn't something like the following exchange:
Staffer: Sir, why are you doing back stretches?
Obama: I'm preparing to bow to heck out of myself before the Japanese Emperor. There's healthcare work to do, and I need to give the wingnuts something else to focus on for a few days.
See, I'm not a proponent of the 11-dimensional chess theory, but I'm starting to wonder if this politics thing is not really that complicated. Maybe it's not chess. Maybe it's more like Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, or perhaps just "ball".
If you sit a young child in front of a visibly empty box, close the lid, and tell the child that there is now a monster in the box, the child will move away. Tell them there's candy in the box, and they'll open the box to check it. They can't help it, it's just where they're at developmentally.
Most Republicans haven't moved beyond this developmental stage, so if you tell them a bill contains death panels, they'll march against death panels. If you tell them it will cause Christmas to come three times a year, they'll start making fruitcake.
Unfortunately, most Democrats haven't moved too far beyond this developmental stage either. We'll still check the box for candy, but we'll pretend it was because we were just curious how much candy could fit in there... hypothetically of course. We're good at subtle lies and prevarication, but we lack the gift for bald-faced fabrication, so we can't really take advantage of Republican stupidity to the fullest extent.
What we can do, however, is play their childish attention spans and tantrum proclivities like a $3 banjo, and I'm hoping that, as the healthcare bill goes into the home stretch, we'll see Obama do more of these distraction maneuvers. Perhaps, right before the final vote, he'll, I dunno... sign a halt to DADT.... just a thought...