Make no mistake: I’m as far from multi-lingual as you can get. I took four years of Spanish between high school and college and I know “nosotros” means “we” (I think) and I can pronounce all of the popular south-of-the-border beers and most of their signature dishes that you can find in stateside Mexican restaurants. Other than that, it’s a good day when I can remember to keep the “ll” silent in “paella.”

So this isn’t an easy job. If you’ve ever tried to set up network permissions on an American version of MS Vista Ultimate Aero, try doing it in Turkish and tell me it doesn’t make your skull hurt and your eyes throb.

So, most days when I come home after a 40-minute commute listening to progressive radio and trying to figure out how a moratorium on a 17-cent gas tax that’s going to be the ruin of our transporation infrastructure even as I curse the U.S. Grant note that I’m laying down at the pump every week is going to be a good idea, my brain is more or less the consistency of Cream of Wheat. But I made a commitment to this blog, so it’s a tall order sitting down at my coffee table laptop when I come home and trying to make some sense of what’s going on in politics and the road that is going to lead us to the next Vice President and President of the United States.

God bless Keith Olbermann for bringing intelligence and sanity back to the mainstream networks, and I love watching him every night, but when I get home now the TV is usually just rolling off of my 6:00 PM taping of Hannity and Colmes. I don’t know why I always TiVo it, because I never watch it. So given the diminished state of my brain and of my patience for the more pressing and anger-inducing issues of our day, I have a habit these days of leaving the TV on Greta Van Susteren. I always feel dirty, like I’ve just shopped at Wal-Mart.

She’s been on FOX News a million years but every time I turn it on it feels like I’m watching the O.J. trial again, where she made her bones in the first place. This is an apparently intelligent woman who long since sold her soul in the interests of a bigger payday for People magazine-style expotainment.

I ran across Greta’s show many times over the last several years, but the thing that made me curious over time was that she was so desperately trying to recapture the urgency and 24/7 passion of the O.J. Simpson trial. Everytime I tuned in over several months, I was treated to one case and one case only: Natalie Holloway. Yes, this is a tragedy for her parents, but how many other teenagers have been murdered around this country during the lifecycle of the Natalie Holloway case? I can’t count on the hands of all my neighbors within a three-block radius the number of times I’ve turned on the television only to see another story on Joran van der Sloot and Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. They might not even be guilty but I know their name better than my state legislator.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this weren’t so shamelessly serialized. Every installment is another titillating episode. There are a few thousand parents all over the country who are feeling the same pain as the Holloways, but on Greta she’s the only teenager in the world who was ever the victim of foul play. Of course, the argument goes that Natalie and her case speak for all those who don’t have a voice. Well, nice try. Find the little bastards who killed her, if they are little (okay, I’ll weigh in: Joran did it), and string them up. Then let’s move on to solving the next missing girl case, even if she’s brown and poor and not so telegenic.

The nets have been coming up empty lately apparently. The best she could do tonight was a blonde Olympic skater who was slipped a ruffee. Before they got to the attempted date rape, Greta had to offer, “I’ve never spoken to someone who’s a double-gold medal winner before, so that’s exciting for me!” But back to your drugging.

It’s like this every night, interrupted now and again by an ostensibly sexist Joran van der Sloot third-grade art project just uncovered. You have to wonder after a point if the Botox is having an effect. That gets talked about a lot, and it is striking when you see that face and wonder what one ping with a tuning fork would do to any dogs in proximity. And with every sentence leeching out of the corner of her mouth, she looks like she has the best makeup person a stroke victim has ever had. I’m more inclined to think she got her last shot during an unfortunate sneer, and in the 21st century botulinium toxin version of Mom’s “don’t make a face or it might stay that way,” Greta is getting a very contemporary comeuppence.

Jesus, I spent ninety minutes in front of FOX News writing this entry. I think I’ll happily go back to my Turkish operating systems tomorrow morning. At least they’re more defensible in their relative incomprehensibility than a lazy and unhealthy hour of Greta Van Susteren. I don’t understand why I land on the shit that I do sometimes. Morbid curiosity, I suppose. That’s the best I can come up with.

This was as close to anarchy as you could get on a major network news program, and you knew that many of these people, like future CBS Evening News Saturday anchor Thalia Assuras, were smart and funny people just passing through paying their dues on their way to better jobs, but getting the plum opportunity to screw around on a national stage first. They were never disrespectful of the news. They were having fun.

FOX News does their late-night schtick differently. They hire morons.

Gretchen Carlson and Steve Doocy (don’t make me go there–it’s too easy) are your hosts on Fox And Friends if you’re unfortunate to have insomnia and can’t find the remote.

I don’t leave the TV on on FOX News when I fall asleep on the couch. I did that just once, and being awakened at 3:00 AM to white people yelling at me is a spectacular annoyance. I still had to TiVo a segment of Fox and Friends just to get a better idea why they were so goddamned noisy and not using their inside voices. It didn’t take me long to get edified.

In a segue from a story about whether John McCain has done enough to distance himself from the anti-Obama GOP ad running in North Carolina right now masquerading as a spot for their governor’s race, Gretchen may have well been describing a singing chihuahua as she exulted, “Did you know there’s a food ration across America right now? I’m fascinated by this!”

With this news of a nascent starvation crisis among America’s poor, Steve took the opportunity to effusively expound on his shopping habits. “I DON’T…I don’t buy rice…by the…”

“In bulk?” asked Gretchen.

“No, I don’t buy the…I buy the little boxes. I don’t buy the 20-pound bags,” he said with a chortle. So I don’t care who starves in America, because it doesn’t affect me.

“So, you’re more of a Rice-A-Roni man?” Gretchen asked.

“I’m more of a Condi Rice man!”

“You’re…oooh! Realllllly! Interesting to find that out about you, Doocy! Wow!” But back to our talk about Americans who are going to be denied the opportunity to buy basic foodstuffs.

They invited Jenna Lee from the FOX Business Network on to offer a fresh and tittering analysis on what the ration on America’s rice is going to mean to people like Gretchen Carlson and Steve Doocy. She explained that there’s a concern about a shortage, so, she says, “you don’t need to go out and bulk up on your big items at this point.”

“Well, how ’bout potatoes?”, Steve shouted with a chuckle. “Potatoes are okay, right?”

They dial it down for a moment to show their concern for America’s Great Unwashed. So, Steve steps in to ask for reassurance, “So, no one’s hungry, right?” No, Steve, only the people who can’t afford to buy enough food. But if they’re lucky enough to be employed right now, they get the occasional donut in the breakroom at Wal-Mart, where they’ll shop at the end of the week when they get their paycheck for their 32-hour “full-time” workweek and can’t afford to shop anywhere else. They get lots of Ramen for their families.

They moved on to a story about the polygamy scandal in Texas. It was apparently a woman named Rosita Swinton who called an Arizona-based crisis center trying to alert authorities to the polygamy nightmare going on inside the Texas cult. “Isn’t she also an Obama delegate?”, Steve asked. “She is.” Chortle. Get it? Because she’s black, and crazy. I think that’s what he’s getting at, at least.

Bear in mind that I was less than six minutes into Fox And Friends when I’d already witnessed this stupidity. This is the kind of blog entry that just writes itself.

Fox And Friends was in the news a few weeks back when their co-host, Brian Kilmeade, who was vacationing this week when I watched (or “vacationing”; I have no idea yet) walked off the set after a disagreement over Barack Obama’s race speech. Kilmeade was trying to explain Obama’s thinking–as a man who is half-white and half-black–in talking about his grandmother as a “typical white person” when she said that some black men frightened her. Gretchen and Steve were asking Kilmeade, “Are you offended by Barack Obama referring to his grandma as a ‘typical white person?’” Kilmeade acknowledged their point and attempted to explain that Obama’s grandma had grown up in the 1930s and Jeremiah Wright had grown up in the 1960s, and they had a different perspective from what the very white Doocy, Carlson, and even himself would have had. They had none of it. “It’s a generational thing, is what he was trying to say,” said Kilmeade.

Doocy piped up, “Yeah, well Brian, what if I said you’re a typical sports guy, would you take offense at that?”

“You proved my point,” Kilmeade said, and walked off the set.

“He needs to lay off the Sanka!!!”, said Doocy.

It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of this before your brain starts to hurt. These two people don’t have a full brain between them–not even close. FOX could have hired some young up-and-comers who are hungry and unsupervised enough to add a real edge to their late-night show. They’re not a threat, though, because no one is watching. No one was watching World News Now in 1993 either, but it was fun because these were smart people going somewhere. Steve Doocy and Gretchen Carlson are going onto their next contract negotiation for their current position, and then they’re going to the glue factory when they don’t get renewed.

Hannity and Karl Rove (who looks very stiff in his new pundit roll–like a warhead with jowls and a neck sac) spent the first ten minutes assailing Barack Obama’s arrogance. “He is an ironic, sardonic observer of what’s been going on in the Senate since he got there,” Rove said. Hmmm. I think if any American body is deserving of sardonic analysis it would be the can’t-shoot-straight United States Senate. Besides, I’m pro-sardonic, and I vote.

Newt Gingrich stopped by to join in the fair-and-balanced fracas. “The left wing of the party admires American terrorists,” Gingrich said. I’m racking my brain and the only American terrorists I can come up with are Tim McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, and I never remember them in any DNC ads, though Obama may have attended a fundraiser at one of their homes.

The second half of the show ramped up to Hannity’s potboiler for the evening: That “we’ve learned” that Barack Obama attended the Million Man March in 1995 to “better understand the movement…and wanted to be an observer rather than a participant.”

They printed Obama’s remarks which they “uncovered” from a 1995 Chicago Reader article. “What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together and affirm our rightful place in the society. But what was lacking among march organizers was a positive agenda, a coherent agenda for change. Without this agenda a lot of this energy is going to dissipate. Exhortations are not enough, nor are the notions that we can create a black economy within America that is…sealed from the rest of the economy and seriously tackle the major issues confronting us.” I’m trying to figure out where the “kill the white man” subtext is that I’m apparently missing there.

“But Obama’s reaction to the March gets more shocking,” Hannity intones. “He continues, ‘But cursing out white folks is not going to get the job done. Anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements are not going to lift us up. We’ve got some hard nuts-and-bolts organizing and planning to do. We’ve got communities to build.’” You hear that, Sean? He’s coming for your daughter. You’ve spent enough time reading about what goes on in the ‘hood–you know what “nuts-and-bolts” means.

He buffered the clips with some of the least-offensive public comments Louis Farrakhan has ever made. “It is curious how the Illinois Senator will not speak about his attendance at the March. This raises the question: Just how much do we really know about Senator Barack Obama.”

I had to watch it a second time to figure out what made the whole episode and Obama’s reflection upon it so shocking and offensive, and I realized it was because it relied on black-and-white and slow-motion footage. You could take black-and-white and slow-motion footage of me buying eggs at Safeway and sell me as an al-Qaeda sympathizer.

I TiVo’d two episodes of Hannity’s America. One of them was supposed to be Hannity and Colmes but I suppose there’s no difference, since they’re both Sean Hannity’s shows and Colmes is just the guy in the liberal chair who gets to speak occasionally as long as he knows his place and doesn’t press an issue that Sean can’t swat down like a slow dragonfly.

I remembered an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when someone spoke of a relative who died on 9/11. It turned out that he had a heart attack on 9/11, even though he was nowhere near New York, Washington, or Shanksville. Hannity has been beating the drum about former Weatherman William Ayers bragging on 9/11 about setting bombs and wishing he’d set more of them. Wow. That’s some pretty incendiary stuff. We’re getting into Ward Churchill territory here; maybe even worse.

Well, it turns out that Ayers was discussing a recently released book about his life. He indeed said he didn’t regret setting bombs, though he never killed anyone, even though he’s being derided as a murderer. When he said “I feel we didn’t do enough,” the context was “…to stop the war.” And the article just happened to appear on 9/11–and was on newsstands and open in coffee shops when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. It was what I believe is referred to as “a coincidence.”

Clinton ball-washer Lanny Davis was front-and-center on the second episode deriding William Ayers as “a murderer” (he never murdered anyone. Seriously.), and stirring up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright hokum again. Speaking respectively on each issue, Hannity reiterated that Ayers had made his comments on 9/11 and concurred that Obama still had “serious questions” to answer about his association with the America-hating Reverend Wright.

I made it another five minutes before I realized that I was watching the same episode over again. Or I wasn’t. Or I was. I never could tell.

In any case, that was as much as I could do. I don’t make a very good white male, I think. Maybe I’m not rich or angry enough.

But I know one thing: Mitts off, Sean. I want my America back.

Well, good for them. Because these are the kinds of things that I think about every week when I’m putting another $50 in my gas tank (what used to cost me $20 just a few years ago): How can I vote for a President who won’t wear a flag on his lapel? I’ve heard him prattle on about affordable health care, but I have to wonder if his reticence to endorse a single-payer plan has anything to do with his sympathy with the Weather Underground. I know he claims to be concerned about our kids dying in a stupid war in Iraq, but is it really just a smokescreen for the fact that his former Marine pastor doesn’t love America as much as he does?

This was stupidity writ large. Never mind the fact that most viewers have only a vague idea of who the Weather Underground was, they certainly don’t think of them when they’re at the checkout counter considering their increasingly enormous grocery bill. Stephanopoulos and Gibson focused on trivia that has nothing to do with our daily lives, except when the media makes an issue of it, and we talk about it in our daily lives. Make no mistake: I understand politics, and I understand when an ill-considered phrase can spark the ire of the electorate and give the candidate a little explaining to do, but a televised national debate isn’t the forum for that, and it certainly isn’t the catch-all forum for the minutiae that’s been debated ad nauseum in the media for weeks on end. The moderators’ performance attracted a not-insignificant 16,800 mostly-negative comments on ABC News’ Web site.

Stephanopoulos was incoherently unrepentant. “We have been researching this for awhile,” he said of the William Ayers/Weather Underground question. “Part of what we discovered is that Senator Obama has never been asked directly about it.” How now? That’s the defense for a “When did you stop beating your wife?” question, especially when George concedes that this is a question that Republican minds have been asking. Pick any tawdry point of inquiry. “We have been researching this for awhile, and part of what we discovered is that Senator Obama has never been asked directly whether he’s ever downloaded child pornography.”

That was the most despicable element of the evening’s debate. Stephanopoulos appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio program the night before. Hannity asked him about William Ayers and whether George would ask Obama that question at the next evening’s debate. “Well, I’m taking notes now, Sean.” Apparently he was. When Sean Hannity becomes the arbiter of journalistic conduct in America and the example to be emulated, we are in very deep trouble. In fact, maybe we already are, but I’ll get to that.

There’s nothing I can say about Wednesday’s debacle that Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News didn’t say spot-on perfectly on his blog this week: “By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself.”

He’s right, but just to play devil’s advocate, H.L. Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” By our affection for the banal we’ve sown the seeds of our own stupefying. We may not live it in our daily lives, but in our politics, far too many of us live for the dumb, for the flag pins, for the angry pastor, for the stupid slipup criticizing our values. We live for the personal affront and wait for the apology before we offer our vote in forgiveness. By our insatiable taste for the salacious and the trivial it’s very possible we invite this manifestation of democracy. FOX News didn’t rise out of a vacuum after all.

In a country where in the average election, roughly four out of ten people vote. and in the rare, best case scenario, six out of ten, how seriously do we really take our democracy? As retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor pointed out, “One third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government, but two thirds can name a judge on American Idol.”

As the bumper sticker says, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” We are living in a time of a pointless war, dire economic mismanagement, and crumbling infrastructure, but do a man-on-the-street and not even half will be able to tell you who their Congressperson is. There ain’t a lot of outrage out there, or at the very least, there isn’t enough. ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson are working in a world where the money of the morons pays the bills.

That said, though, the responsibility to change that begins with the people with the megaphone, and that’s the mainstream news media. It was heartening, at least, to see that this was the highest rated debate of this campaign season. It’s just disappointing that ABC thought they had to compete with The Moment of Truth.