Cue the shiny objects

As Bush and his Republican cronies, some of whom purport to be "true" (which once, long, long ago used to mean fiscal) conservatives, try to explain how they're going to pay for Katrina, Medicare reform, Rita, tax cuts, Social Security reform, Iraq and Afghanistan (and Iran? or is it Syria now?), AIDS relief in Africa, increased funding for No Child Left Behind, and something about going to Mars all at the same time, they have seized upon that well-worn Reagan chestnut -- eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse -- as their panacea.

Once again, I say-I say ONCE AGAIN, this is nothing but classic Republican misdirection, a strategy they use relentlessly, but apparently with Main Stream Media (MSM) impunity, to divert attention away from real issues by throwing up more red herrings than a hungover penguin with an ulcer.

So they want to trim the fat do they? Well answer me this: after controlling both houses of congress since 2003 and the presidency since 2001, why hasn't that waste, fraud, and abuse been rooted out already? In fact, not only why hasn't it been rooted out, why has federal spending ballooned exponentially since Bush took office, AND just in the last three months, why has Congress passed two massive spending bills -- the Transportation bill and the Energy bill -- that are universally acknowledged to be rife with pet projects, earmarks, and fat, cracklin' pork?

In fact, according to a study by the Citizens Against Government Waste (a warm, sheltering, supportive, non-profit front behind which small-government conservatives and big business executives can band together against the oppressive forces of the public good and do some bathtub drowning of this here runaway federal government), "in the years since the 2003 budget was introduced, pork-barrel spending has climbed from $20.1 billion to $27.3 billion, with the number of earmarked projects rising from 8,341 to 13,999."

Remember folks, this is on the conservatives' watch. This taxpayer-funded, special-interest-focused, free-for-all spending spree is happening not in spite of Republicans' best efforts, but because of their best efforts. They are flat-out bullshit hypocrites that yap about fiscal responsibility and tax-and-spend democrats and eliminating waste, and bitch about how the government is wasting money trying to protect the environment from unconscienable corporate polluting (which they assure everyone could be more effectively done through the efficiency of industry self-regulation) and poor people are just getting too much of "your" money, all the while greasing the skids for their corporate and special interest buddies to make billions -- their real constituencies, by the way -- and making a little political hay for themselves by bringing some trickle-down into their home districts.

And as they're harumph-humphing around the floors of the House and the Senate (Hey! I didn't get a harumph out of that guy!), pompously yammering on about freedom and opportunity and freedom and liberty and strengthening and building and the future and, and, the children, and [Senator, pause gravely here, wait, wait, wait for it, now: tremble the lips a little bit, clear the throat, grab the lectern with both hands and look directly into the cameras and . . .] the grandchildren (and the crowd goes wild), the hope is that everybody will forget that these same political blowhards that are trying so hard to seem genuine in their outrage are the ones that knowlingly and willingly caused the problems that they are now so upset about.

Now misdirection doesn't work unless you have a patsy, or a demagogue , or, with the public's current attention span and level of interest, any shiny object that refocuses public attention away from the dudes in the three-piece jumpsuits that are "gathering" stacks of cash right off the back loading dock of the US Treasury.

Only because Katrina and Rita have brought "unforseen" pressures on the federal bankroll, is congress being forced to publicly scramble for cash. Everybody, and I mean EVERY-FREAKIN'-BODY, and that means the politicians (of both parties), the special interests, the media, and the public, knew that with all the tax cuts and the foreign wars and the heady spending of the feelgood Republican Earmark Era, there wasn't enough money to go around, not even close. We went from record surplus to record debt in record time. But nobody cared, at least not until the hurricanes came along and tore off the bullshit dome under which Americans have been living since 2001 to reveal that America is so financially strung out, we're only about two more tax cuts (or one tax cut and one natural disaster) away from having to blow China behind the dumpsters out back of the UN building just to keep them from repo'ing the State Department.

Cue the shiny objects.

So where do our trusty politicians urge us to focus our wrath? Low-hanging fruit like the billion a week we're spending in Iraq, or the mushrooming Defense and Homeland Security budgets, or corrupt legislation? No, no, no. To be successful in the ole misdirection play, you also need to skillfully execute another time-tested Republican strategy: vehemently argue that something is the opposite of what is actually is. In this case, it's not rampant, whole-scale giveaway of billions to the corporations and the special interests, it's the waste, fraud, and abuse of $25,000 earmarks and pork-barrel spending projects.

As I said, a telltale sign of Republican disingenue is when they overprotesteth. Now that everybody suddenly cares about how much money we don't have, the Republicans are covering their backs by pointing out random, disjointed bits and pieces of "excess spending" in the Energy and Transportation bills (that they rammed through). Haven't really heard any other thoughts on how they're going to solve the bugdet shortfalls, but I have heard about lots of things (the usual suspects: Iraq, Defense, tax cuts) that are absolutely off the table.

That's funny, cuz "when asked by a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll how they'd prefer to finance the (at least) $200 billion Katrina relief effort, only 6 percent [of Americans polled] proposed cutting domestic spending and just 15 percent supported increasing the deficit. A majority -- 54 percent -- chose 'cut spending for the war in Iraq.'" Hmm.

But just when you think you have them on the ropes, along comes clueless Gomer Press, about an election cycle late and a pair of testacles (or breasts) short, bumbling onto the scene with all the sensitivity and attention to detail of an LAPD homicide unit. Flopping around like Odie and sounding like Scooby-Dumb, the press inevitably steps right into a steaming pile of political bullshit and tracks it all over the real issue. In fact, the press is so predicatable, Karl Rove's entire political strategy is based upon using the press to manipulate and/or neutralize public opinion.

"Huh, uh what, what's going on here fellers?" Gomer P. babbles. The policitians, presented with an exit strategy, start hollering bloody murder about bloated spending projects like opulent $1500 wheelchair ramps or Caligulan $100,000 bikepaths. A bikepath damn their souls. How dare anyone in this country even think of building a bike path with taxpayer money before every possible tax break for chemical, drug, and energy companies has been completely exhausted. It's beyond irresponsible, it's treasonous. If the tragedy of 9/11 has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that if Exxon-Mobil doesn't increase net profits at least 20 percent quarter on quarter, the terrorists win.

Because, yeah, there are several bikepaths, and sidewalks, and museums that are funded in the Transportation bill, but there aren't that many of them and it takes a lot of $250,000 projects to add up to $286 billion. No, what I see a lot of in this bill (and check the list yourself) are roads. That's right, roads roads-roads roads ROADS. Shitloads and shitloads of roads for gasoline burning cars. Not much in there for light rail or mass transportation. Nope. Just shitloads of roads.

And whooaaaa Nellie, lookie here on page 20 of the report, line item number 406: $100,000,000 for "Planning, design, and construction of a bridge joining the island of Gravina to the community of Ketchikan." Yup, this is the infamous bridge to nowhere.

I don't care what other bullshit projects are in this bill, ditch the bridge to nowhere and you've just freed up $100 million for education or Medicare or Louisiana or even, perish the thought, public transportation. One might expect that the Press would have the same idea and start pushing for more information about this funny smelling bridge to nowhere. Nope. Seems the Press is willing to be deliciously puzzled by this endearing little example of political business as usual. No investigation, no Katrina-level outrage, just some impish grins, a few devil-may-care shoulder shrugs, and they'll leave it at that. Sometimes the world is just a kooky, goofy place.

The bridge to nowhere says everything that needs to be said about the corruption of the Republican party, the prostitution of the American political system, the degradation of the Press, and the complete abdication of all responsibility by the public. Sure there's some "pork" in these bills, and yes, this "pork" should be put to better use. But don't start busting balls over bikepaths and museums and guardrails. All the guardrails in the world don't add up to the waste, fraud, and abuse of one unnecessary bridge, not to mention the waste, fraud, and abuse of the no-bid contracts for Iraqi and Katrina reconstruction. As the old bumper sticker used to say, "It will be a perfect day when schools have all the money they need and the Air Force is forced to have a bake sale to buy a bomber."

Oh well, what's a few hundred billion dollars among friends of the Republican party.

Is Bush hitting the bottle again?

Oh my. Air America and the liberal blogosphere are all a-twitter today with the National Enquirer's scoop that President Bushmill is once again hitting the bottle. Of course, other than a minor reference to this story in Froomkin's White House Briefing, the Main Stream Media (MSM) is taking a pass on this one.

This should not come as much of a surprise -- neither the drinking nor the refusal of the press to look into the allegations.

Let's quickly review some of the evidence for Bush's drinking. Not psychological studies of recidivism in addicts; or research that points out how difficult it is for addicts to stay clean without participating in a formal support program; or the fact that part of overcoming addiction, one of the 12 classic steps, is to take responsibility for your actions and apologize to those you have hurt as a result of your addiction (and we all know how willing Bush is to take responsibility for anything or admit his mistakes) -- this type of discussion is well represented in the blogosphere right now. Instead, let's look at some Page A-26 circumstantial-type evidence.

First, clearly, clearly, Bush has an addictive personality. He has acknowledged being a hardcore lush up until the morning after his 40th birthday. There are also numerous allegations of habitual cocaine use during this drinking period. After he quit drinking, Bush became addicted to Jesus, plunging mindlessly into religion. Then, after being elected Governor of Texas, Bush became addicted to power, eventually scoring the presidency and using the position to try to extend his power to every corner of the globe. In the last couple of years, Bush has become addicted to mountain biking to the extent that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service have standing orders not to interrupt his bike rides for any reason, including national emergencies.

Behavioralists and geneticists may disagree over whether Bush's behavioral patterns represent a genetic predisposition to addiction or are simply a result of his pea-brain trying to seize onto anything that will give structure and purpose to his life, but the evidence is there for all to see (and the Bush people have even trumpeted this as one of his best attributes): when Bush gets something in his head, he becomes obsessed with it to the exclusion of everything else. Whether it's social security reform, the war in Iraq, or mountain biking, total, mindless obsession equates to addiction.



Then we have suspicious incidents such as the infamous pretzel choke in 2002. In this article, CNN generously describes it as a fainting episode. Note the spin and misdirection. There is detailed discussion of how the White House physician thinks that the pretzel somehow stimulated the Vagus nerve, lowering his pulse and precipitating the blackout. But just for good measure, as any good defense attorney with an obviously guilty client will do, the Administration makes sure that there are several other possible scenarios laid out, just in case some busy-body physician reading the article should take umbrage with the Vagus nerve cover story. Other possible causes floated in the article include "a mild illness" and an unusually low pulse rate attributed to his regular exercise regimen.

Seems pretty flimsy from here, especially considering that he was apparently alone for the entire blackout incident (is the President ever alone?), and minutes later, all physical tests were allegedly normal (including pulse rate).

So what happened with the pretzel? Try to the fill in the blank here: Football game, TV, pretzels, and ___________. What's missing? Uh, beer.

Not convinced. Sure, no problem. Let's go to exhibit number three: Bush drinking beer in public. As noted by those press elite lucky enough to be invited to the special press party at Bush's ranch on August 26, Bush served beer to guests at the party and drank a non-alcoholic Buckler beer.

Isn't it really bad practice for recovering alcoholics to hang out in environments that include alcohol? And wouldn't most therapists, physicians, and psychologists strongly recommend against any kind of alcohol-related libations? But there was Bush, doling out the suds for his buds and sucking down a few "fake" beers. Did anybody check the President's beer or did they just take his word for it that it was near beer? Non-alcoholic beer sure makes a great cover for the real thing -- looks the same, smells the same, tastes the same -- how would anybody know the difference? How indeed.

And one of the reasons why it's not a good idea for recovering alcoholics to sublimate their addictive impulses with near beer is that even non-alcoholic beer has alcohol in it!



OK, so he's drinking alcohol at a party, but because it's near beer, you're going to give him a pass. Fine. On to exhibit number four. The champagne toasts. It seems that there are endless opportunities for Bush to lead champagne toasts (finally, an applicable venue for his unique leadership skills). The latest was his champagne toast at the UN summit on September 14. Check out the end of the video, was that apple juice that Bush was celebrating with?

Now couple this circumstantial evidence with some of Bush's unfathomable statements and actions, and the case strengthens.

But where is the press on this one? It took them about four years to finally pretend to look into the National Guard story. And the Downing Street memo languished for a month after the British press disclosed it before the American press gave it a lukewarm "so what?" Oh yeah, and where's Jeff Gannon now? And how is that investigation of the Valerie Plame leak coming along? And what was the deal with the Cheney Energy Council?

But let's not blame this one entirely on the press, at least not in the present. Sure, they've had five years to ask some questions, do some digging, and refuse to take Administration talking points and PR at face value, but that's all cerveza under the bridge. Now that there are some cracks in the once impenetrable Bush facade, well, the MSM is slightly more emboldened, so somebody might actually stumble into this story, right?

Which brings us to yesterday's National Enquirer story. How does Page A-26 know that there's something to the Bush drinking whispers -- because of the National Enquirer story.

It's not what's in the story that's important, it's the fact that it was reported by the Enquirer. Think about it -- if you were the Administration and you knew that your boy was drinking again and that sooner or later this information might find its way to a legitimate journalist, how would you go about putting the clamps on this story before it got loose in the MSM? Well, you'd "leak" to a publication so maligned, so disreputable, so debunked that its very association with the story instantly delegitimizes it.



It's brilliant, really. Leak the story to the Enquirer as a way of making the story untouchable. Because the Enquirer was the first publication to run a significant story about Bush's drinking, all the Administration drones and right-wing parrots out there can immediately equate the story to alien autopsies and Liz Taylor's 17-year old transsexual Afghan love child. Anyone who touches this story now is immediately tainted by association. Who can take this story seriously now that its been broken by the Enquirer? This has Turd Blossom's fat, sweaty paw prints all over it.

If I was an editor at an MSM organization, I would immediately assign some reporters to follow up on this story. My very first question would be: who leaked the info to the Enquirer? Come on MSM, reverse engineer for truth god damnit! Who were the unnamed sources for the story and what were their motivations? Start with these questions and follow the lies.

Is Bush drinking again? Or should the question be, did he ever really stop? It's impossible for those on the outside to know, so we have to rely on the MSM to ask these questions for us. Unfortunately, while there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to at least generate some curiosity among the press, it appears that nobody in the MSM has the cajones to actually take a bite. I give this story about another day and a half before it drops off the table until about the year 2009 when some tell-all New York Times bestseller by a former Bush Administration official (and probably ghost-written by Judith Miller) will reveal that Bush was a falling-down drunk for his entire presidency and that everybody in the White House and the press corps knew all about it.

Oh well, wink-wink, chuckle-chuckle, and look the other way. Hey, at least he's not getting a blow job and lying about it. Or is he? How would we ever know?

That's entertainment!

I make my living off the Evening News
Just give me something-something I can use
People love it when you lose,
They love dirty laundry

So everybody is pointing fingers now about the mess in New Orleans and guess who's leading the charge for accountability -- the television media. How ironic. We all know that television has a very powerful influence on American public opinion, but for the last seven years or so, ever since Monica Lewinsky became the biggest threat to the American way of life since the birth control pill, we have been content to let the television media go AWOL. Rather than focusing on its responsibility to provide NEWS, the television media has been allowed to focus almost exclusively on ratings and profits.

As much as anybody -- as much as FEMA, as much as Michael Chertoff, as much as state and local officials, as much as Bush, -- the press is complicit in the recent disaster in New Orleans for two reasons: they could have helped stop it from happening, and they are directly profiting from it.

Since Bush took over in 2001 and started systematically dismantling the federal government with tax cuts, faith-based initiatives, spending reappropriations, and blind faith in state sovereignty (uh, except when states rights interfere with the larger agenda -- see Terry Schiavo, see gay marriage, see medical marijuana, see stem cell research), the television media has had ample opportunity to question the Bush Administration about not only its policies but also its procedures. How many bald-faced lies have been perpetrated on the American public by the Administration in the last five years -- Medicare reform, Cheney's Energy Council, the Valerie Plame outing, THE FRICKING WAR IN FRICKING IRAQ, the real story of Pat Tillman, the California energy crisis, Bush's mountain biking greatness, Jeff Gannon, Mission Accomplished!, tax cuts for the lower and middle classes . . . and on and on. The television media not only had front row seats for all of these stories, they facilitated them. They had a chance to investigate and ask the tough questions, and accurately present the facts. They had a chance to honestly inform the public about the political machinations that were going to affect people's lives.

But they were derelict in their duty. Instead of growing a set and cutting through the Administration misinformation to the real issues at hand -- how these policies affect the nation as a whole -- the press too often got tripped up by its desire for continued access, its allegiance to the bottom line, and its hopelessly confused concept of balanced coverage.

Until now. NOW! Now that Bush and his people have finally gone too far with their lies and image manipulation, now that the public's willingness to believe in it's leaders has been stretched to the breaking point, now that the American public is finally rising up in anger, now that the forces of change have been put into motion, now the television media comes out from behind its corporate boards and its advertising revenue and its insider access to the powerful and famous to finally speak up.

Pathetic. The television media had a chance to stop the New Orleans flood, if they had only sunk their teeth into coverage of the Administration's appropriations cuts and revisions that took millions of dollars slated for infrastructure projects -- including specific monies for the levees in New Orleans -- and moved them to the more amorphous and Bush/Cheney-friendly Defense and Homeland Security budgets. By questioning the PR-driven, valueless, supply-side, trickle-down tax cuts that have helped widen the gap between rich and poor in the nation and have left the country's infrastructure weakened and vulnerable. By questioning the organization of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), or by shining a light on the systematic dismantling of FEMA, or by directing more attention to the qualifications of Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff. And they could have made some effort to examine the rationale for going to war in Iraq, a war that has a large percentage of the National Guard deployed half a globe away. They could have come in handy this past week.

We can do "The Innuendo"
We can dance and sing
When it's said and done we haven't told you a thing
We all know that Crap is King
Give us dirty laundry!

But the television media didn't fight for straight answers, instead they played the game. They posed straw-man questions; they gave the arguments from both sides equal weight in a misguided nod to objectivity, even when the facts clearly supported one side or the other; they lobbed softball questions, accepted Administration answers at face value, and rarely followed up on obvious gaps in logic or reason.

The television media was first puzzled, then outraged when Bush declared on September 1, 2005, two days after the city of New Orleans filled with water from Lake Pontchartrain, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." But why should this come as a surprise to anybody that has been paying attention the last five years -- this President is full of shit, and the fact that the television media is just now waking up to this fact is itself pretty revealing.

Because even though the President, the Congress, FEMA, the DHS, and the television media were not interested enough to look into the New Orleans levee situation, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, NPR, and the New York Times were concerned enough to run lengthy stories about it as far back as 2002. But levees are just not sexy enough for TV. Now dykes, especially dykes getting married, well stop the presses, they'll give Joe Scarborough and Neil Cavuto and Bill O'Reilly carte blanche to beat that topic into the ground for days on end.

The press has a unique position in American society, and they must use this position to probe, to pressure, to push those in power for answers. But at the highest levels of the television media, in the boardrooms, the decision has long since been made to favor ratings and profits over information. At the individual level, media personalities have sold out to the forces of fame and fortune. It's just easier to accept things at face value and stay in the game, which includes appearance fees, radio deals, book contracts -- membership in the cult of celebrity has its advantages. Nobody is going to risk all that to rock the boat. The result is a corrupt, bloated press that foreshadows the very decline of American civilization that it refuses to acknowledge.

Plenty of outrage should be showered on the President and his team. Whether by incompetence or design, they sure did a good job of fucking this one up. But where is the outrage at the television media? Instead of anger at their poor performance, the television media is instead being hailed for finally growing a spine and sinking their teeth into the Katrina story.

Maybe because the television media is so powerful, it can control the discourse about itself. Whether it's politics or business or sports, or entertainment, it's all PR anyway, so the television media makes sure to clap itself on the back loudly and often, effectively creating its own positive image.

I just don't understand how even reliably cynical types such as the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin and contrarian blog HoorayForAnything can be sizing the television media up for their Medals of Freedom right now, because the television media still aren't getting it. Despite all their indignation and anger at the disaster in New Orleans and the bungled relief efforts, they are still not able to put two and two together and come up with four.

For example, in the last week of August, the Census Bureau released some rather grim statistics that showed that the number of Americans living in poverty rose by 1.1 million to 37 million last year. The Census Bureau went on to add that it is the fourth straight year that poverty has risen. So as the television media decries the terrible plight of the residents of New Orleans, even timidly pointing out that most of them are poor and black, they still cannot or will not address the elephant in the room: this Administration's total disregard for all but the economic elite in this country. Where is the outrage about the Census Bureau numbers? I guess it's just easier to strap on a field vest and poke around dead bodies and destroyed houses while hyping ratings with unsubstantiated descriptions of armed thugs running rampant on the city streets shooting babies and raping puppies than to draw a line between elitist public policy and it's effect on the masses.

And I have yet to hear one single TV talking head acknowledge that the looting (the actual looting, not the the survival collecting) is being done for many of the same reasons that precipitated the riots following the Rodney King verdict: when people are disenfranchised and abused by the system they get angry, and when circumstances present an opportunity, frustrations will boil over into rioting, looting, and other forms of protest. I guess such discussion would fall more along the lines of provocative social discourse though, and the news is not about discourse, it's about intercourse, it's about entertainment, it's about celebrity galas, it's about staged photo-ops, it's about corporate and Administration talking points, it's about agenda-setting.

And we haven't even talked yet about how the television media is waving its collective hanky for the Gulf Coast with one hand and counting its profits with the other. Executives and "talent" for network news channels and syndicated news services lie awake nights dreaming about events like Katrina. Such fortune may come along just once in a career. With 24 hours to fill every day, the network news channels usually have to devote hours and hours of air time to supercilious coverage of every cute white teenager that goes missing, every soldier pumped up about returning to Iraq for a second tour of duty, and every wisp of cloud that darkens the Gulf Coast shores -- coverage complete with elaborate graphics, expensive on-location reporting, and panel upon panel of distinguished experts to discuss ad infinitum the totally obvious.

But along came Katrina, and the media could hardly control it's glee. It was going to be big, and that meant at least two days of heavy weather, followed by at least a week of cleanup stories; Katrina was bringing with it a solid week's worth of salacious news content and tragedy. Television media executives and producers know that Americans love tragedy, whether Americans will admit it or not, and with tragedy comes ratings.

Because let's cut to the chase here, network news stopped being about the news decades ago. It had of course been sliding toward the precipice for years, but the news part of network news was given the final shove off the cliff during the Gulf War when Arthur "The Scud Stud" Kent and Wolf Blitzer stood on their rooftops in Riyadh and Tel Aviv and showed media people everywhere that the "news" was as much about the reporter
and the theatrics of reporting as it was about the events being reported. Folks, that's called entertainment, not news.

The television media was up to all of its old tricks (definitely read this brilliant indictment of everything that is wrong with network news), and the grandstanding for Katrina and the subsequent levee breeches was obvious and totally unconscionable. This went far beyond the obligatory shots of some poor field reporter in rain gear standing out on a jetty somewhere being pounded by wind and rain while trying to file a report on the fact that there's a storm outside, this was blatant exploitation. For reporters and studio anchors, it was a chance to lay out their best cheesy sentiments and maddeningly cutesy prose ("for local residents, relief supplies coming to them like it was the end of the world had some wondering if the end of the world was coming to them" -- uh, this line should be read in the sing-song voice of drippy television news magazine journeyman Keith Morrison); for producers it was a chance to capitalize on the emotional appeal of human tragedy and grief.

In addition to the endless loops of personal stories of "tragedy and heroism" and the same 45 seconds of footage shown over and over again, news anchors got their time in the sun, and field reporters breathlessly recounted their heroic efforts to get the stories. Words like tragedy, devastation, heartbreaking, and crisis were used relentlessly to sensationalize the facts, to make them more enticing to the viewers. Images like the ones CNN showed last Wednesday of distraught and displaced people congealed into staged irony by contrasting them with a shot of the nearly submerged street sign for Humanity Drive in New Orleans are used to pluck the heartstrings and pull in viewers. Reports of thousands of dead without any corroboration (remember back on 9/11, initial television news reports were baselessly speculating at up to 50,000 dead when the actual number turned out to be less than 3,000?), bodies floating in the streets, and up to 100 armed men holding the convention center. Was this the news or the latest episode of CSI: New Orleans?

Lest there be any doubt that TV news coverage of Katrina was about ratings and profits rather than news, each of the network news channels continued to play their standard rotation of commercials throughout the special reports and breaking news coverage that dominated programming on Wednesday and Thursday of last week. CNN teasers announced "overwhelming emotional destruction" and "firsthand accounts of survival and loss" in the same smarmy voice that last week hyped Larry King's interview with Pamela Anderson. Promos for the Anderson Cooper show on Wednesday promised "Chaos in New Orleans," "Bands of gunmen roaming the streets," "The body count continues to grow," and "Anderson Cooper goes on a search and rescue mission." The latter turned out to be a camera crew following Cooper around as he shamelessly poked his face into people's flooded houses looking for dead bodies like he was filming a demented episode of Room Raiders and made comments like "the smell is overwhelming."

Cooper in particular was in fine form on Wednesday, making his bid for an Emmy, or at least an Edward R. Murrow Award, with gems like, "heartbreak and chaos have risen as high as the floodwaters" and "we went out with search and rescue workers today, we'll show you their grim discoveries when we come back (from commercial)," at which point the critical news coverage was interrupted for a British Petroleum commercial. Over on MSNBC, the promo for Rita Cosby Live & Direct boasted of "the stories and heartbreak only we can bring you."

And each network continued to cycle through its regular daily coterie of news anchors, giving each of its featured studio hosts a chance to have their 9/11 moment of journalistic heroism. You could almost see it in their eyes: every anchor was giving it their theatrical all, so that when the inevitable documentaries of this disaster are made, when the history of this disaster is written, they will be as much a part of the story as the people of New Orleans. It's disgusting.

The studio anchors looking so grave and concerned then kick it out to a reporter in the field, invariably positioned theatrically against the backdrop of either tragedy or devastation. In one story about the possibility of E. Coli bacteria in the fetid floodwaters of New Orleans (No shit? who would have guessed), CNN even had poor Elizabeth Cohen squatting down in the foul water with nothing but a thin pair of hip waders between her and amoebic dysentery. Oh the stagecraft. And there was Anderson Cooper again, looking so clean and freshly shaved on his search for the dead that studio anchor Aaron Brown felt compelled to comment on it. An embarrassed Cooper quickly brought the discussion back to the misfortunes of others.

We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde
who
comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam
in her eye
It's interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry

Most offensive of all is the way the anchors' somber and emotional reading of the syrupy teleprompter script suddenly turns upbeat, with a smile, or a least a rueful smirk curling on their pampered lips as they cut away from floating bodies and starving babies to send it over to Flip Diddler for at look at this weekend's rosy weather forecast for the nation's beaches.

What is the point of showing crying babies, and screaming mothers, and total human devastation over banner headlines like "New Orleans chaos," "Finding bodies," and "New Orleans nightmare"? The point is sensationalistic imagery and language that generates ratings. Ratings attract advertisers and raise the prices for commercial time, and that translates to higher profits. And there you have it, the modern television media in a nutshell.

The news networks were certainly not disappointed in the reviews of their New Orleans theater. According to David Bauder of the Associated Press, "Ratings for the cable news networks also spiked, typical for big events. Fox News Channel averaged 2.8 million viewers last week, up 184 percent from its average this year; CNN's 2.1 million was up 325 percent and MSNBC's 766,000 was up 250 percent." Damn, that's oil company numbers there.

It is clear that the television media is content to go for ratings and let the news fall where it may. Sure, some decent reporting has been done, and the television media does deserve credit for bringing the terrible suffering and inept relief response along the Gulf Coast to the attention of the world. But let's not pull a muscle patting the television media on the back (they're doing a pretty good job of that themselves), because it is clear from the television coverage and the subsequent ratings that television media has looted its fair share from the people of the Gulf Coast and should be looked upon as greedy profiteers for their disingenuous posturing and callous opportunism the past 10 days. Go ahead and spew your venom for Bush, Chertoff, FEMA, Ray Nagin, Kathleen Blanco, Congressional leaders, or Grover Norquist, but save some for the messengers too.

You don't really need to find out what's going on
You don't really want to know just how far it's gone
Just leave well enough alone
Eat your dirty laundry

--Don Henly, "Dirty
Laundry"