Geniuses

Bob Somerby, as my Dear Readers are reminded over and over, is generally incomparable, but there are times when he can be a bit...obtuse. The Editors call him on it this time.

We hope Mr. Somerby enjoyed his decade-long vacation on the great planet Jupiter, and we eagerly await the day when he will post what must be spectacular holiday snapshots. For only someone who had spent the last 10 years vacationing on the gaseous planet Jupiter could propose that the media was ignoring a story because it was trivial. Only if terrestrial television signals had been hopelessly scrambled by the great planet's powerful magnetic field could Mr. Somerby not be sick of hearing the names "Paris Hilton", "Jonbenet Ramsey", or any of the thousands of irrelevant nanocelebrities whose vapid, titillating stories are the primary interest of our trivia-phobic press corps. Only if one was tens of millions of miles outside the delivery range of the New York Times could one not recall the wall-to-wall coverage of Al Gore's scandalous choice of shirts, John Kerry's troubling haircut, or the other infinitely irrelevant subjects of mindless blather which are compulsively discussed while wars rage, famines and diseases kill, scientific breakthroughs change our understanding of the universe, and the powerful lie and deceive, much to the total indifference of most of America's best journalists. Only if all of this was true, and only if one's brain had been utterly destroyed by breathing pure frozen methane since Monica Lewinski was in high school could one possibly propose that the press is ignoring a White House sex scandal because it is trivial. There can be no other explanation - for, as the great Sherlock Holmes observed, once you have eliminated everything that is impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. As it is impossible for a person who has spent any time on this planet to make the statements he has made, strange as it may sound, he must have been vacationing on Jupiter. We should just be thankful that he has only spent ten years on Jupiter, and not, for example, the last millennium floating in the freezing black vacuum beyond the orbit of Pluto. Who knows what theory about press coverage of the Gannon story we might be subjected to then - perhaps that the press won't cover the story because it involves the press, and they just don't like to talk about themselves?

Having disposed of poor Bob -- and I'll surely take note of his response as The Daily Howler does not like to be beaten by its own stick -- they find someone who does "get it."

Every president has sought to manipulate the media. But historians say that Bush, unhappy with what he calls "the filter," is courting controversy in his quest for innovative formats. Several conservative commentators have been paid to trumpet Bush policies in their work; one recipient, Armstrong Williams, is being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission. And two agencies have disseminated pro-Bush videos that look like TV newscasts, without disclosing the Bush sponsorship - a breach of federal law, according to the Government Accountability Office.