The Guardian: "When he picks his nose, which digit does he use? And what does that say about him?"

[kpete]

Is Obama elitist? Is his poor bowling a turn-off?
This is the nit-picking idiocy of 24-hour news TV

THE GUARDIAN

Monday April 28 2008 on p5 of the Comment & features section. It was last updated at 00:37 on April 28 2008.

Is Barack Obama elitist? Will his middle name harm his campaign? Are voters turned off by his lack of bowling prowess? Did he give Hillary the finger during a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina? When he picks his nose, which digit does he use? And what does that say about him?

The first four questions were genuinely posed by US TV news over the past few weeks. The nose-picking question wasn't. But it's no more puerile and pointless than the ones that were. The answers to the real questions, incidentally, run roughly as follows:

1. Is Obama elitist? Of course he is. He's running for president. It doesn't get much more elitist than that. Still, in terms of privilege, he'd have to go a long way to beat the ding-dong incumbent. Bush hails from a family of oil barons, billionaires, CEOs, former presidents, Scrooge McDuck and Daddy Warbucks. He's slept in a gigantic rustling money nest every night since the day he was born. And he's got an uncle made of gold. But since he also looks like Alfred E Neuman and talks like he's ordering ribs, he's viewed as a straight-talkin', down-home regular Joe, albeit one with so much blood on his hands it's surely in danger of caking and congealing and turning his fists into heavy balls of scab, each one the size of a cabbage, good for thumping against desks and doors but not much else. Although even if that did happen, even if Bush called a press conference on the White House lawn and stood there demonically beating out a funeral march with his scabby orbs on a nightmarish drum fashioned from human bones and skin - even under those circumstances, you sense he'd somehow get away with it. Because that aw-shucks grin looks good on camera.

....................................

When you stand at a distance and survey this level of nitpicking idiocy, taking in the full landscape of stupidity and meaningless analysis, it's hard not to conclude that 24-hour rolling news is the worst thing to befall humankind since the Manhattan Project. The focus on conjecture and analysis has reached such an insane degree that pundits are chasing some kind of meaning in the way a presidential candidate scratches his face. This is what lunatics do when they think people on television are sending them personalised messages. Where the rest of us see Vernon Kay hosting a gameshow, they see evidence of a conspiracy, and they scan every wink, nod, and eyebrow twitch for veiled threats or coded instructions. Except the lunatics have an excuse: they're lunatics. Lunacy is what they do. It's in their job description. News networks are supposed to offer news. Instead they serve little but loops and chatter. They may as well show footage of passing clouds and invite their pundits to speculate on which one looks most like a kettle and which one looks most like a pony and let the race for the presidency be settled by a bowling match.

much more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/28/television.barackobama

[silverweb]

1. Go, Guardian!

Shameful that it takes a foreign paper to say it right.

I hope the our idiot media are properly embarrassed, but I doubt it.