Joe, Katie, and George Costanza
I really thought I was going to miss Al Gore running for President. Over the years he has given so much comedic material to people like me that I thought there would be nothing to write about. However, Obama vs. Clinton got snarky, the DNC flirted with a cat fight, and John McCain throws everybody a curve ball by selecting Palin. Yet, Gore remained the champ for campaign kookiness. Or as George Costanza once said, “please, a little respect. For I am Costanza, Lord of the Idiots.”
But moments later in that Seinfeld episode George announced, “but suddenly, a new contender has emerged.” And if Al were here tonight, instead of saving an arthritic squirrel from eating nuts produced by a farmer that uses ghastly fossil fuels to transport them to the market where an old man who talks to himself purchases them to feed to the squirrels who are his only companions now that his son has moved to La Jolla and never calls… was I going somewhere with this sentence?
Oh yeah, I was going to point out that Joe Biden is on his way to supplanting Al as the electoral village idiot. And who better to help him than Katie Couric. It seems Katie was pitching her usual softballs in an interview when Biden offered this gem:
“Part of what being a leader does is to instill confidence is to demonstrate what he or she knows what they are talking about and to communicating to people … this is how we can fix this,” Biden said. “When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘look, here’s what happened.”
Wow, Joe Biden was in his 3rd year of law school in 1929, so you would think he would know better. Of course if you had a TV in 1929, you would have been shocked to see Roosevelt talking since you would expect your actual President in 1929 Herbert Hoover to be laying down the wisdom. Still, few people would have known that Roosevelt was masquerading as President four years early because few people owned the experimental medium at the time.
You would think someone who gets paid $15 million to read the news ought to know things like that. Chalk it up to another reason for CBS to have buyers remorse. I have to think NBC execs spit Absolute out their noses every time someone mentions Couric’s ratings. More people watch Gilmore Girls reruns than CBS news these days.
All of this has me encouraged. We could see new heights of stupidity in the next few months. I’m going to need a TiVO and some Cheetos.
Carry on, Citizens!
