By Pat Bataillon
Last night I saw some great footage on the CBS local news at 10. It was a clip from a political show called The Bleeping Truth. One guest called the other a liar and the other responded in typical politico fashion with an emphatic denial. Things got a little heated and one guest left the stage in a blind rage, but not before feeling it was necessary to hurl a plastic chair at his debating partner. That is classic politics.
I wish that all news channels would show this kind of material because it is downright hilarious. A chair blindsiding a guest is better than a pie in the face or its slimy modern-day equivalent. Chair hurling is what today’s politics is all about, and it makes for good TV. I look forward to the moment in the 2008 presidential debate when Dennis Kucinich finally heaves a piece of furniture at Newt Gingrich – that will be MasterCard priceless.
And it’s not as if local news organizations have much else to work with, outside of war in Iraq and the Middle East and (almost forgot!) Afghanistan and (apparently) Sudan. So chair-hurling it is. And let’s send a bunch of reporters to “cover” the president’s vacation at the phony ranch he bought just for the 2000 campaign in Crawford Texas. What a cowboy! Smoke em’ out, Bushie!
Instead of a failing economy or a terrible foreign image or president that 60 percent of Americans don’t like or a corrupt legislative branch or skyrocketing military spending, I wanna know what’s on Condi Rice‘s iPod. There isn’t enough of that sort of thing on the news.
If I were in charge of a local news station, I would make sure to bring the hot button issues in Florida home to Chicago. I would love to hear about, say, an alligator living in a Florida neighborhood. That’s news, and that’s the bleeping truth.
Posted on August 9, 2006