Swell Sentiment

Kevin Drum:

If I could have one small wish for today, it would be for the blogosphere on both left and right to refrain from political point scoring over the London attacks. Just for a day. Isn't tomorrow soon enough to return to our usual arguments?

I had the day off yesterday. Was up for an hour or so around 6 AM, fed the cat, started some laundry, and went back to bed for another hour, because yard work was tops on my To Do list and I really wanted to give my belatedly-purchased copy of Gillian Welch's "Time (The Revelator)" another listen while I was about it. I don't make any outdoor musical noises before 9 AM at the earliest, 11 on weekends. When I got up the second time my wife had CNN on.

So, of course, that interrupted morning plans for a good hour or so, and I went back and forth between chores and watching news and reading some reports online. Between then and the time I felt I had to sit down and write something (rather lacking in political point scoring, I think, but that isn't the point), I saw:

• The sorry state of cable news in the form of talking hairdo Soledad O'Brien and especially her partner, the escaped disk jockey from an Adult Contempory station somewhere on the prairie, Miles O'Brien, extemporizing. Not a pretty sight, and not for those who might be considering suicide. At one point Miles, who could be suspected of using Steve Carrell's Daily Show character as a role model, uttered the following, which I am rendering in the form of a sentence fragment, since I don't know what else to do with it: "The repercussions of this all just becoming familiar to us, known to us." And that's just the line I bothered to write down.

• Andrea Mitchell playing the role of Beltway insider, explaining the intricacies of John Negroponte's role in the newly reorganized Multi-Mega Interagency Security Protocols for what seemed like ninety minutes. At one point she referred to some CIA function or other as taking place "off campus", which I suppose is literally supposed to mean "not at Langley" but really means, "I, Andrea Mitchell, am the consummate insider".

• MSNBC's White House correspondant, David Gregory, reassuring us that despite the fact that Bush was in Scotland and Cheney was either in the wilds of Montana killing surplus game species or in Colorado secretly getting another heart, both were instantaneously in charge of things via video conferencing, so America could rest easy, secure in the knowledge that none of their crackpot appointees was running the show. Why Bush was appraised of terror attacks in London when nobody thought it necessary to interrupt his exercise program when his own airspace was breached was not addressed.

• The response to the above report from the NBC A-Team of Brian "Raccoon Eyes" Williams and Katie "Perky But Solemn" Couric who were called in to weigh down the anchor desk at MSNBC, which was a two-minute Gee Whiz Isn't Technology Amazing I Remember When They Used To Have To Use Telephones duet reminiscent of the New York Times' "Scientists Use Computers" headline that Corndog caught.

• The usual assortment of twenty-three-year-old "terrorism experts", all of whom seem just chock-a-block with inside knowledge of the nefarious interconnections of world terrorism, but none of whom seems to be doing anything about except sell books.

So, Kevin, what I say in response is this: my one small wish is that we'd have twenty-four hours when The News covered "the news", instead of rampant speculation, random thoughts from the professionally vapid, and free-of-charge White House public relations work. By the time I'd sat through a couple hours of that I was actually looking forward to reading Michelle Malkin take on the Islamofascists.