Took a drive up to Crystal Lake today where my friend cuts and colours my hair for about half the cost of what I’d pay at her downtown salon. (Thanks, M!)
I tuned into NPR on the car radio in hopes of getting some world news. Silly me, there was a presidential debate last night so essentially the “news” stories were filtered through the news people’s interpretation of what the candidates said, punctuated with a sound bite or two to illustrate how the candidates sounded when they said it.
The focus was mostly on Sen. John McCain, the most probable Republican candidate for President of the USA. On NPR’s Talk Of The Nation talk show the first caller wanted to express her opinion of 3 or 4 day-old New York Times John McCain sorta implied sex scandal story, got a going over. Meh. I read the story. It wasn’t that great. Certainly not all that newsworthy but the pundits, always the pundits spinning. <eyeroll>
Next up was more non-news, again focusing on John McCain’s campaign. This one featured Robert Siegel talking with Bill Cunningham, host of the radio program The Big Show with Bill Cunningham. I was wary because anyone who has a radio show with that title would make me wary. Bill Cunningham was all that basking in his 5-minutes (I can only hope) of notoriety because at a McCain rally he was recruited to “get the audience’s blood pumping” by “giving them some red meat.”
Cunningham’s way of giving this red meat was to refer to Sen. Barack Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama” three times.
I thought that host Robert Siegel was just a wee bit too easy on the guy, I suppose in an attempt to remain neutral? Anyway, Cunningham’s defence such as it was, was that he’d been recruited by low-level Republican members (it’s not his fault) and most amusingly that we should “talk to Franklin Delano Roosevelt or John Fitzgerald Kennedy.” Guess we are to call them back from the dead? He didn’t eleaborate. Oh, and he (Cunningham) didn’t say anything “untruthful” because that’s the name Barack’s parents gave him. I can’t recall a more mealy-mouth-sounding individual and why NPR gave the man a fraction of the news time they did doesn’t speak well of the network. The guy’s a bozo. He should be dismissed as such and let’s move on. No one cares that (this is the lead to the story!) “Cunningham has since renounced his support for Senator McCain.” It had to have been a really, really slow news day.
Tags: Barack obama, John McCain, news, NPR's, political, Robert Siegel, Talk Of The Nation
