Pundocrats Proliferate

The Wall Street Journal has a good article on bloggers, pundits, purveyors of opinion, and radio talk-show hosts [who get started in one instance by paying $125/hr to confabulate on-air].

I have begun to listen to Glenn Beck in my car because of his CNN evening program, and read Debbie [Key] Schlussel from time to time. She is a sort of snarky Sabra from south Michigan---the kind I met way back when I lived in Ann Arbor for three years. She has a right to be paranoid, because she is the canary in the coal mine target for Hezbollah sneaks who set up mole-holes in Dearbornistan---they may want to target her as an example, since free speech and civic discourse are not their strong points.

Dr Sanity is unmentioned by the WSJ piece, but should be on talk shows rather than the dreary twaddle parlayed by cute shrinkettes. Pat Santy is an Ann Arbor shrink whose knowledge of psychology is matched only by her acute political instincts and wide knowledge of Marxist methodologies now being employed by the MainStreamMedia. I'm posting her latest musings on the hyperventilating media.

Flavia Colgan has a Brazilian-Irish charm that is almost irresistable, although she is maddeningly imprecise trying to please everyone. Schlussel could pass for an Ann Coulter Bat-Mitzvah candidate, but Colgan is more cerebral and less abrasive---but more of a treat to the eyes than the flint-edged pushy DS.

There are hundreds of pundit-wannabes pacing the streets of Manhattan waiting for their cellphones to summon them to a studio for a last-minute replacement for someone else.

Way back in the first Gulf War, I was the only guy in the Riyadh press corps who were on live-TV every day questioning the military who had any oil expertise, any Saudi expertise, and any military experience. The reporters from most press outlets were fresh out of journalism 101 and were sent by editors who must have been hard-put to find Saudi Arabia on a map.

So CNN, PBS, and the broadcast networks would put me up as a talking head, and I can assure you that it's an ego-expanding experience. My brother got a lot of my exhalations on videocassettes and I now have a thirty-minute compendium of my image being sent over world-wide networks to far-flung places---another brother saw my TV face in Australia.

Back in the day, words that come easier as I begin to collect Social Security and sink into relative dotage.