Positive Liberty

CNN has hired Erick Erickson as a political contributor. Until news of this spread, I was unaware of who Erick Erickson was. As they say, ignorance is bliss. Because it seems to me that this hire spells the end of any hope for civil discourse about politics.

It’s bad enough that talk radio has become a burnt-over district of purposefully dishonest conspiracy theorizing and hate-mongering. At least we could pretend that such grotesque idiocy was ghettoized. And the prevalence of rabid anti-intellectuals on the internet is no surprise–the minimalistic cost-structure of the medium means that for many it is simply a replacement for badly spelled handbills stapled to utility poles. And Fox News is such an unintentionally self-parodying outfit that no reasonably intelligent person could begin to take them seriously.

But CNN, for all its pomposity, for all its blandness, for all its failure to really be a cable news network–CNN at least kept up a pretense of having rational discourse about politics. So their decision to hire someone who’s known primarily for calling a Supreme Court justice a “Goat f***ing child molestor,” is a near-fatal blow to any hope that there can be a national presence for serious adults to engage in reasoned political discourse.

It’s not surprising that the person who says such things and is rewarded for it would be a conservative. Liberals, for all their many faults, mostly don’t engage in such egregiously uncivil behavior. And if they did, they would be excoriated by the right-wingers, for whom foul language is a sin only when the other side does it. Conservatives without conscience indeed.

One can only hope that there’s enough decency left in this country that this backfires on CNN the way hiring Rush Limbaugh for Monday Night Football backfired on ABC.

Start with the difficulty any reasonable person will have feeling sorry for someone who receives a $32 million severance package and a mere eight month non-compete restriction. Add to that the fact that many of us who can remember Johnny Carson in black & white (we who the networks demographically don’t care about anyway) always saw David Letterman as Carson’s proper successor on the Tonight Show and you can pretty much guess my opinion of NBC’s situation. In case you just arrived from a galaxy far, far away or have foolishly thought the earthquake in Haiti or the Senate race in Massachusetts or even the NFL playoff games have been the big news lately, the Tonight Show War II has become a global story, so I’ll let the Chinese media explain the current mess:
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In 2006 and 2007, I really enjoyed watching Keith Olbermann’s program. I thought he was funny. I thought he was attacking the right targets. But back then, there were already folks saying he wasn’t stable. His on air rants, though nowhere near as dramatic as say a Glenn Beck, were still dramatic.

But still, he was good for a laugh. Now, he’s just indignant all the time — and always at Republicans, never Democrats (unlike the more honest liberal who hosts during the hour following him). He’s a partisan to the point of shrill. As evidence, I present this comment from Tuesday night’s broadcast…

“In short, in Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex nude model, teabagging, supporter of violence against women, and against politicians with whom he disagrees. In any other time in our history this man would have been laughed off the stage, as an unqualified, and a disaster in the making by the most conservative of conservatives. Instead the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is close to sending this bad joke to the Senate of the United States.”

I’m no fan of Scott Brown, so I come neither to praise or bury him. It just seems to me that there was a time when a national network would’ve shown someone the door who said something rude, bombastic, and over the top…

Oh yes, Olbermann’s employer showed their morning host the door for making an ill-advised joke about a women’s basketball team.

But Olbermann was serious.

Hardball delenda est.

Or so David Letterman, who knows something about arrested development, quoted Martin Mull. Letterman was ripping into his former employer NBC while watching the network self-destruct or, at the very least, destroy The Tonight Show, one of the few remaining jewels in its crown. What Letterman failed to add, probably because he’s never had much experience outside of show business, is that much of the rest of adult life is high school with money, too.

Still, insofar as one attempts to understand Hollywood, it’s always wrong to forget that the most important word in the phrase “show business” is “business.” Continue Reading »