Just one more side trip, friends.
First, to express my delight that Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No hanging chads in Norway I guess.
And to share with you what has got to be the most absurd moment in the media’s coverage of the presidential campaign to date. As you may remember from my Sexual Politics post last week, I am continually dismayed by the amount of attention paid to female candidates’ looks. Well, CBS has taken it one step further and actually had the nerve? stupidity? to comment on Hillary Clinton’s laugh. And actually not her laugh, but more specifically, the absence of her "cackle" during a recent MSNBC interview.
On Talking Points Memo, Steve Benen writes:
I was particularly fond of the way CBS tried to distance itself from its own report. The senator’s laugh, the report said, is "overly analyzed." Apparently, it’s so excessive that CBS finds it necessary to note its absence.
In related news, Rudy Giuliani delivered a speech yesterday in which he didn’t answer his cell phone; Mitt Romney answered questions without abandoning a position he held five minutes prior; John McCain hosted a town-hall forum in which he did not refer to anyone as a "little jerk"; and Fred Thompson went the whole day without responding to a reporter’s question with, "I don’t know anything about that."
And just think, the election is still more than a year away. How much weirder is it going to get?
Tags: Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize, politics, presidential election
How sad. How true. And how funny. The theater of the absurd assembles for another campaign.
I am somewhat ashamed to say that I did not vote in the last Presidential election and this is part of the reason why. It really bothers me that the media focuses on such absurd things as a candidate’s laugh rather than the real issues. This has been a growing problem in all aspects of the media. If I have to watch/read one more story about Britney Spears, I might throw up. I wish CBS would leave that sort of thing to E! and give us the real news. People just love to hate, I suppose, and the media will report the money-makers.