News is a drug

David Gregory must wake and bake.

In my effort to replicate the best parts of the “back-to-the-land” movement of the 70s, I’ve been trying to avoid the siren song of cheap electronics, mass-produced in China by slave labor.  I left my television back in southern California.  I gave up facebook and ipods and tivo, along with the stress those things produce.  I couldn’t give it all up, though.  I still need my pc for work, and I’m still wired.   I try to avoid using it for all the other temptations it provides, but every once in a while, the spirit gets weak.  I’ve been particularly angry about the debate over the Cordoba community center that’s been taking place lately, so I broke down and watched a couple of news shows this morning to catch up.  Now I’m coming down, and it doesn’t feel good.

One of the reasons that I was so happy to abandon my television when I left L.A. was that I felt poisoned by the constant stream of idiocy beamed out by news shows.  (“News show” by the way, is a perfect example of a modern oxymoron, since the “show” dictates the absence of anything that might be based in fact).  Anyway, I slipped up today, and caught a few minutes of Meet the Press, a show I never really liked all that much even when Tim Russert was still hosting, but one that I”ve come to despise ever since Gregory took over as host.  What a tool that guy is.

The various discussions about the Cordoba community center in lower Manhattan were as disappointing as I thought they’d be – “good Muslims”?  Really? –  but I was caught off-guard by the way Gregory slipped in the republican talking-point about raising taxes as though it were true.  Dave did the same thing on his blog a couple of weeks ago, and it made me just as unhappy to see it there, but I think Gregory has a slightly bigger audience than Dave, so it’s that much worse.

It’s bad enough that the new amnesiacs in the republican party – sorry, I keep forgetting to apply the new brand – in the Tea Party can so loudly spout off about deficits out of one side of their mouths while simultaneously proclaiming the need to re-up on the dumb tax cuts that weren’t even paid for the first time they supported them (back when they were running things and didn’t care about deficits).  Even worse than the hypocrisy, though, is the way they’re trying to spin a new version of reality to support that hypocritical position:  instead of the temporary tax cuts coming to an end as they were designed to do,  the new reality they’re spinning as though it were true is that Obama is proposing massive tax hikes.   I suppose I should feel grateful that they’re not having the news clowns call it Obama’s Ramadan Tax…   or reparations…

But okay, redefining reality to better suit their goals is, after all, what partisan hacks do.  They spout ridiculous nonsense as though it were obvious truth.  Fair enough.  It used to be that the careful viewer could discern a little space between the partisan hacks and the journalists, and in an ideal world, the journalists keep the hacks honest.  Or, at least, more honest.   Tim Russert was a blowhard, and he could get pretty caught up in the showmanship that passes for reality in DC, but at least he was willing to resist the unreality from time to time.  In contrast, Gregory seems to delight in repeating the phony talk as though he’s proud of being able to remember what he hears other people say.

Sad.  I’m going to go wander in the forest until I stop thinking about it.

UPDATE:  I’m not saying that a Nobel Prize winner has to poach ideas from me, but it must mean something that Paul Krugman’s complaining about the same thing today that I was complaining about yesterday.  (Maybe that my ego is outgrowing my cabin?)