Whore talking point: "Everyone cares more about baseball than debates"

[Cocoa]

I heard this a number of times, from a bunch of different pundits.

Joking sometimes, but not always, and even when joking they were also conveying a cynical, anti-democratic message.

Jay Leno's monologue was especially bad on this last night, his first five or so jokes were just pure anti-politics, which rings totally false this year, when politics are actually very interesting, and of course unbeliebably important.

[Warpy]

1. Whore shootdown

Debates: 36 share

Baseball: 16 share

[StlMo]

6. Exactly.

Tens of millions of Americans watched the debates.

[On the Road]

2. Actually, I Think About Twice as Many People Saw the Debates

although I can't remember which site had those numbers.

On Edit: That's it! (first post)

[Owlet]

3. .and then we have Doris Kearns Goodwin..

..who only watched the debate when the game got too scary, yet was able to analyse it (the debate) on Imus this morning. Good piece here on The Daily Howler

http://www.dailyhowler.com/

WHO IS DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: It’s all over now but the spinning! In particular, we’ll wait to see how the press corps treats John Kerry’s unwise comment about Dick Cheney’s daughter. On Imus this morning, Imus was slamming the comment hard—and so was his early guest, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who turned in the type of revealing performance one sometime gets from guests on this program. We’ll wait till tomorrow before we discuss the ten-minute Goodwin appearance in detail. But Goodwin’s performance was an instant “cable Democrat” classic. She started out trashing Kerry, then trashing Gore. She said that she and all her friends thought Bush won last night’s debate. (They felt he was speaking more clearly to “Joe Sixpack.”) She then puzzled hard, trying to figure why Kerry had won the post-debate polls; it must be because of Iraq, she opined, because it surely wasn’t Kerry. And she revealed the inevitable, of course; she said she had only watched parts of last night’s debate because she was watching the Red Sox instead. Question: Does anyone know why a person too lazy and disinterested to watch this debate is on TV the next morning discussing it? But Goodwin has been this way for years. When she isn’t copying pages out of real scholars’ books, she’s busy reciting inane cable spin.

[Cocoa]

4. so why was she there?

she should have told Imus to get a guest that had seen the debate.


edit: my email to PBS's NewsHour:

Dear NewsHour,

This morning on "Imus in the Morning", Doris Kearns Goodwin discussed last night's debate in great detail, but then admitted that she hadn't seen the whole thing, had been flipping between the debate and the baseball game.

The relation to your program is that she is a frequent guest on your program, as is David Brooks, who once reviewed Hillary Clinton's book without having read it.

What is it with NewsHour regulars and commenting on things they know nothing about?

[The_Casual_Observer]

5. Goodwin was made famous for the cameos in the

"Baseball" documentary. Sounding all serious, scholarly and so on about senseless & mindless entertainment. The woman is a hack who's political opinion has no merit.