On The Radio . . . Whoa Whoa Whoa, On The Radio

So I have a Sirius satellite radio. I am an unashamed fan of Howard Stern and there's no way he was moving to satellite without me.

There's lots of channels on Sirius other than Stern, of course. Tonite on the way home from work I happened to tune over to "Talk Left" and "Talk Right". The Left channel was in commercial, so I went on to Right.

The voice sounded familiar. Eerily familiar.

Turns out it was Jerry Doyle. Doyle is perhaps best known for his character Michael Garibaldi on the cult TV show Babylon 5. He also ran for the U.S House of Representatives for California's 24th District.

Anyway. Altho Doyle was on "Talk Right", the snippet of the show I heard didn't seem Right or Left. He was talking about the way America is distracted from things that should be important (he mentioned Able Danger specifically) by trivial matters like the Entwhistle murder case or Michael Jackson's latest shenanigans. And it got me to thinking . . .

He's right. The media is in a feeding frenzy over the Dick Cheney shooting accident non-event. When it isn't that it's Entwhistle. Or Jackson. Or Madonna. Or . . . well, name the unimportant story of the moment.

We're not being served by our media. Especially by our "news" media. The void is allowing the rise of blogs, to be sure, but the blogosphere is a realm suffused with hysterical bloviating on both sides of the spectrum. There's some decent reporting going on, but the bias is off the dial.

It's television mainly at fault, I think. TV's twenty-four hour news cycle is a relentless monster devouring all before it. But it's also a very superficial medium with a short attention span. Driven by ratings, which aren't even particularly accurate.

This post is a hasty one. I wanted to get it down before I lost the train of thought. More later, I think.

Chicken Little Strikes Again

So in his very first case as a Supreme Court Justice, the Evil Nazi Sith Lord Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse Samuel Alito breaks ranks with the conservative bloc on a capital punishment question.

Horrors. How dare he prove the hysterical outgassing of the Left so wrong? Doesn't he know that The Fate of Western Civilization is at stake? Shame on him. He's a day into his SCOTUS career and he hasn't even eaten one baby yet.

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Cindy Sheehan got herself arrested at the State of the Union speech the other night. Apparently some overzealous security guards interpreted her anti-war tee shirt as a dire threat to the safety of the nation and removed her from the chamber. The Left is of course proclaiming this concrete evidence of the Bush Neocon Conspiracy Against Free Speech.

Somehow a lot of them are overlooking the fact that the wife of a Republican congressman was also removed for sporting a "Support the Troops" tee shirt.

Charges were filed against Sheehan, but quickly dropped on review of the circumstances. No charges were filed against the other woman. Investigations are promised and refresher training for the security force in question is already scheduled.

So another trivial incident gets blown way out of proportion by all concerned as the Left declares an assault on free speech and the Right insists that Sheehan was breaking the law, neither of which was or is true.

American politics. Sound and fury signifying very little. Sigh