Sunday round-tables

I watched the first five minutes of Fox News's Hannity and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow the other day. Both had the same lead story, both had completely different takes on it. It was on Rep. Alan Grayson saying Republicans health care plan wants you to die quickly. Two parallel universes. Naturally Hannity called Grayson's statement "ridiculous, outrageous" while Maddow seemed to be okay with it, with a headline of "Pot, meet Kettle" that Republicans were calling on Grayson to apologize because they thought Rep. Joe Wilson apologizing once for his "You Lie!" outburst was enough. (Never mind the Democrats who thought Grayson's statement was fine but wanted to censure Wilson.)

Anyway, I realized why I hardly ever watch cable news but I like watching the Sunday news-show round-tables. Talking-heads with different opinions are forced to sit in the same room and be nice. In fact I'll rarely watch the people being interviewed on the Sunday shows; it's just spin. But the talking-heads spin has to bounce off each other. If Michelle Malkin goes on Hannity, she can be as abrasive as she wants, but when she goes on ABC's This Week and sits with George Stephanopoulos, George Will and Donna Brazile, she expresses herself in a more polite fashion. Janeane Garofalo may be allowed to talk about Republicans as sub-humans on Keith Olbermann, but if she sat with David Gregory, Joe Scarborough and Eugene Robinson on Meet the Press, she'd probably try to sound a little less like a Rwandan propaganda artist (which Bette Midler also accused Glenn Beck of being.)

My political opinions are always molding, evolving, some issues I care about, some I just don't. I'm Republican, I consider myself a rational conservative, a center-right guy in what's basically a center-right country. Hard-righties can compare Obama to Hitler, hard-lefties can compare Bush to Hitler; it really doesn't matter and it just exposes them.

Bush tried coining the phrase "compassionate conservative" which I guess means cut taxes, increase spending, grow government, and launch two wars without an end game. Obama said the time for change is come, which must mean to spend more than all previous administrations in history combined. All we can do is hope for high turnover in the House and Senate in 2010, and that reporters will act like reporters and not stenographers.