Bo Diddley, RIP

I walk 47 miles of barbed wire,

I use a cobra-snake for a necktie,

I got a brand new house on the roadside,

Made from rattlesnake hide,

I got a brand new chimney made on top,

Made out of a human skull,

Now come on take a walk with me, Arlene,

And tell me, who do you love?

Which is more important?

I just Googled "Scott McClelland's book" and got 621,000 references. Then I Googled "candidates unified on Darfur," which produced just 94,300. Even then, a quick look at the Darfur sightings shows that most do not actually refer to the recent agreement among Senators Clinton, McCain and Obama to unite in support of the people of Darfur.

Let's compare these two stories:

The former has no real news value at all. It’s a small story about a minor, slightly dim, political functionary coming out publically against his bosses. If it weren’t for the fact that 70% of the country hates his bosses it would be no story at all.

On the other hand, the candidate’s Darfur agreement relates to a daily struggle of life and death by some of the most pathetically abused people on God’s earth, who are being hunted down and murdered like dogs by Arab mercenaries on horseback. That alone should make it a better story.
But on top of that, we have the three remaining candidates for the White House publically agreeing on something, (can anyone remember anything similar happening -- ever?), and their agreement takes the form of a moral commitment. How often do politicians do that?

And yet the Darfur story came and went in a day, while Matt Lauer and Keith Olbermann and the rest of them will be bloviating about the McClelland book and interviewing C-list politicos for their “analysis” for weeks to come.

Sometimes I think television intentionally focuses on the least important issues available to them at any given time.

Here’s a short video about the joint agreement from a very effective organization. They make it very easy to get your voice heard in case you want to participate.

3 things on TV I'm sick of

1. Sex in the City. Enough. Please. I didn't watch the TV show and I'm not going to the movie no matter how many promotional tie-ins and SJP interviews I'm subjected to.
2. Gas prices. They went up yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. They're probably going to go up again tomorrow. When they go down -- then it will be a story. Until then there is nothing more to say so shut up.
3. Scott McClelland's book. It's only been out 24 hours but every person in America who ever voted has already been interviewed for their opinion on it. Apparently there is nothing in it we didn't already know about Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al so let's just move on.

Memorial Day

It’s Fleet Week in New York and there are thousands of young sailors and Marines walking the streets, taking it the sights and generally enjoying themselves. I wish I could stop each one and thank them for their service but I don’t; I tell myself they don’t want to be bothered while they’re out having fun with their pals and I hope it isn’t just a rationalization.

I read this morning that the amount of time the
networks now devote to the war in Iraq is 4 minutes per week. Unbelievable.

I’d like to use this space today to acknowledge my family members who have served their country. Air Force Maj. Josh Olsen, a cousin, is the only person I know personally on active duty at the moment. He’s in the country now, but has flown numerous air refueling missions in the Middle East as a KC-135 pilot.

My brother Doug (Navy) is a Viet Nam era vet, and brother Jack (Air Force) served in peacetime Japan.

My wife’s uncle Harry Bosyk died flying a B-17 in Europe in WWII, and her father Bill, trained pilots in that war.

My mother’s brother, Ellsworth McGuire, couldn’t wait to get into that fight. He went to Canada in 1940 and joined the RCAF. As a pilot flying missions over the China-Burma “hump” his plane went down and was never found.

My dad, Jack Blank, was 19 when he joined the navy in 1943. He became a medic and was assigned to the Marines where he was a battlefield corpsman attending the wounded. He participated in the landings at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the latter probably the most horrific battle of the war. He saw the flag raising on Mt. Surabachi, spent two years in the Pacific, endured numerous kamikaze attacks, and was on board his ship in Tokyo Bay to witness the Japanese surrender aboard the Missouri. He never said much about the war. A famous family story has a couple of my brothers watching John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima in front of the family television many years ago. Dad walked through the room, watched a couple minutes of the movie, and walked out mumbling, “John Wayne doesn’t know shit about Iwo Jima.”

Thank you all.

Killery

Both Bob Schieffer and Tim Russert hosted Obama love fests this morning (I’m beginning to think the SNL parody was underplayed) and spent a lot of time bashing Hillary for her comment this week mentioning that Bobby Kennedy was murdered in June. If you saw the whole clip (CBS showed it – NBC did not) she was making the point that lots of primaries have dragged on longer than this one, but this was too juicy for the chattering class to leave without assigning to it a subliminal meaning.

However, the subliminal meaning they hope we will glean is so venal they can’t actually say it without contributing to its efficacy, but it’s there. They want people to believe that Senator Clinton was trying to plant the idea in someone’s head that it isn’t too late to kill Senator Obama – such is the depravity and all-consuming nature of her personal ambition. When I started this blog the very last thing I thought I’d spend time doing was defending Hillary Clinton, but I am just amazed at the unified and unrelentingly hostile nature of the media and political establishments aligned against her. She’s won the majority of the popular vote, she has a reasonable (if non-PC) rationale for why she’ll be the stronger candidate in the fall, and she’s played a key role in bringing out more registered Democrats than have ever been seen before. I don’t even like her but I just don’t understand the forces at work here.

Great movie: On a happier note, do yourself a favor and rent Across the Universe. I wish I’d seen it on a big screen with a great sound system (The Zeigfield Theater comes to mind) but it was great on DVD too. It’s a musical set to Beatles music, set mostly in New York with side trips to Liverpool, Princeton, Washington, Viet Nam and Ohio (really). The time is 1967-68 and the story is the story of the times – sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, politics, assassinations, war, protests and love. T-Bone Burnett adapted the music and even if you were on the other side of the Stones v. Beatles argument, as I was, nothing evokes the times like the boys from Liverpool. The movie uses innovative cinematography mixed with animation to create a mixture of the real and surreal. The choreography was fantastic and there are some great performances in small parts by the likes of Bono, Joe Cocker, and my favorite, Eddie Izzard. Don’t miss this one.

Amazing minutia

This map labels each state with a country name, to which its GDP is approximately equal.

Miscellaneous

• I caught Senator Obama's stump speech today in Montana, and I think he’s been very effective at countering President Bush’s remarks in Israel suggesting that anyone who wants to sit down and talk to people like the Iranians are appeasers. He is punching back with good arguments and doesn’t sound at all defensive. Kerry and Gore always sounded defensive, and therefore weak, whenever they tried to fight back.
• All media may be lame but TV is the worst. NBC makes me crazy. First Tim Russert, blowhard extraordinaire, interviews Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) on Meet the Press Sunday, and practically nominates him for Vice President. What a wet kiss, softball exchange. This morning “NBC-medical-correspondent-Dr.-Nancy-Schneiderman” diagnoses Ted Kennedy from the video of him being loaded into the ambulance (by several strong men). What is the point? Finally, Richard Engle had an “exclusive” interview with President Bush. What does that mean, exactly? That no other network was interviewing W. at that exact moment?
• Senator Obama is warning the Republicans to “lay off my wife” after the Tennessee Republican party ran this ad: http://youtube.com/watch?v=YmWEaqxkGtU
  What do you think? Is the ad fair or not?