Japan is radioactive; the Middle East is tumultuous; unemployment is high; the government is on the verge of shutting down; the president’s high school buddy allegedly tried to hire a prostitute. CNN breathlessly reports:
Most recently the Obama family spent time with the Titcombs on a trip to Hawaii in late December 2010 and early January 2011. White House pool reports at the time noted Titcomb by name on multiple dates during the trip. According to CNN records, President Obama golfed with Titcomb on December 23, December 26, December 28 and January 2. The first family was joined by the Titcomb family on Christmas Day and spent most of December 30 at the Titcomb residence eating, playing volleyball and enjoying time on the beach. The first couple also had dinner with the Titcomb on December 29.
If one of my closest friends from high school got busted trying to cheat on his wife with a prostitute, I’d be pretty bummed. But imagine how I’d feel if CNN tried to smear me by association and turned a little police blotter story in the Hawaiian press into an international story blasted everywhere across the intertubes.
Living up to their acronym:
Contains No News
Palin: He’s paling around with cheaters!
CNN Enquirer. Someone there is evidently spending way too much time with Brit tabloids.
NBC and MSNBC deserves equal billing as co-wankers of the day. Liberals may not have noticed that NBC and MSNBC are quickly morphing into Fox News giving Donald Trump, the now self-defined tea partier and birther, a platform to spew his racist and xenophobic conspiracy theories about the President’s citizenship with virtually no challenge from NBC/MSNBC “news” hosts. There are too many conflicts of interests to count. The question I have is will the white liberal hosts of MSNBC primetime turn their self-righteous indignation from the Black man in the White Hosue to its employer. HELL NO!
Lewis Black comments on The Donald. Commentary I can get into.
Of all the guys in the running for the GOP nod, “the Donald” scares me the least.
He’s widely loathed, except by Teabaggers. Nobody trusts him to do anything except what’s good for “the Donald”. And that’s before we even get into the optics of his ridiculous hairpiece and his attitude.
Trump isn’t a serious candidate – Trump is going to spend the next year or so living the high life on the campaign trail on the backs of campaign contributors and pumping up “the Trump brand” for his next reality TV gig (Americans may hate him, but he brings in ratings – Americans really love their car wreck TV). And to pump up sales on whatever ghostwritten book he’ll have out by the end of the year – nothing like the free publicity of a campaign run to move Trump-branded product into the market.
And if by some strange quirk of chance he actually managed to win the GOP nomination, he’d probably find a way to get involved in a massive scandal so he wouldn’t have to take the pay cut involved in actually taking the job.
Trump’s a con-artist. I have less worries about him running than I do anyone else in the GOP field.
But I will say that if he actually managed to run and win the presidency, it would be an indication that American democracy is completely broken, and we might want to start looking for a new model.
their candidate bench is full of grifters. His hairpiece is amazing though – is it groundhog day? is that a marmot on his head?
These are the kinds of things that just makes you shake your head about the state of our national media. And not really because it involves Obama, or really anyone of notoriety. The real question is what relevance does something like this have to anything? Anything at all?
If I go to cookout at a good friends house on a Saturday, eat a burger and drink a couple of beers; and a week from the following Tuesday this good friend gets a DUI, what possible connection or relevance does that have to me or the cookout I attended at this house?
And it’s not just CNN. On MSNBC.com right now they have this ditty; “Close Friend of Obama Arrested in Prostitution Sting”
What goes through the minds of these people?
Useless idiots!!
Speaking of which, here is some guilt by association that I can get behind.
Not.
Dang, I’d better hurry and set up a Google News Alert for this relevant breaking-news item. I’m sure that Wolf Blitzer will be all over it tonight like a monkey on a cupcake. After all, Pawlenty is a front runner for the GOP nomination, after all.
The Cokie Roberts rule applies here, too. “If people are talking about something out there, then we have an obligation to broadcast it”. After all, their responsibility is not to report what is actual news of any import. Their job is to report on what people are talking about.
They wish they could do a Monica Lewinsky on Obama, but they can’t get anything on him so they have to go to the next level — anyone he’ happens to know. Prae omnia narrativum. (The Narrative takes precedence.)
It’s really only about maintaining the rage and hatred in their base, which needs regular infusions of this sort of thing. The fact that the media so readily play along with such stupidity just reinforces my indifference toward them. They are just a joke in so many respects.
It’s a lot easier to ignore cable news when you realize it’s roughly divided between corporate consensus wanking, with the obligatory very serious people opining on this or that, and throwing out chum for the freak-out/scandal of the week-which is typically racial or sexual or both-and various combinations of the two. And that’s it.
It’s not state controlled media like in China, where they would have simply covered up the BP oil spill. But the media is only interested in such things to the extent that they are sensational. After that, it’s on to the next thing. Powerful interests might get embarrassed for a day or two, but they know if they tough it out the perception of a problem will be forgotten very quickly.
They just love the name Titcomb, too.