Look at the vast influence I wield now. Just yesterday, I post something about the atrocities in Sudan and about a soon-to-be-released album to support the refugees in Darfur, and today, the Bush Administration actually comes out and does what many have been asking it to do for some time, calling the acts of the Sudanese government “genocide.”
See, now they get on board with the UN, asking them to investigate further. Amazing how these pieces of news are released. What happened today to make the government issue such an important and dramatic statement — there’s not much a government can say about another government that’s worse than calling their actions “genocide.” The only thing I can think of is that suddenly there’s a renewed scandal surrounding Bush’s National Guard service. The fires were kindled by a report on 60 Minutes last night as well as by a new group calling themselves “Texans for Truth” who are basically doing to Bush what “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” have been trying to do to Kelly. A bunch of guys who served in Bush’s unit of the National Guard are claiming they never saw him there.
I don’t hate that I’m cynical, but I hate the fact that I’ve become so cynical that I believe absolutely every statement from this administration is motivated by politics, but there’s no other rational explanation for the timing of almost every announcement made to the news media. Joshua Micah Marshall gave a great example of the “coincidences” involved in bad news being followed by some administration announcement to deflect it a couple days ago on Talking Points Memo.
Meanwhile, on a tangental note, I have a memo for Al Franken: Your little Sundance show? Utterly unwatchable. Your Air America Radio show is fine. Uneven, but fine. It’s a good counterpoint to all the right wingers out there dominating talk radio and you’ve gotten better since it started. What makes you think that it’s entertaining in the least for us to watch you and Katherine Lanpher sitting there reading sheets of paper for an hour. Your little sketches lost all the humor they may have had because we can see you guys acting, and while Lanpher is a good radio journalist, she’s an awful wide-eyed actress. When your old writing partner Tom Davis came in and did a bit (with all of you reading the whole thing), we can see it’s Tom Davis before you say, Oh no, just kidding folks. It’s my old friend Tom Davis. When you have a fake Republican stripper come in to “debate” a Boston Globe columnist and Lanpher mocks horror at her being there, it’s not all that great to see the fake stripper turning the pages of her script.
Howard Stern’s E! Show works when there is actually stuff happening in the studio. The studio is also set up as a performance space, unlike your long closet with some banners and folding tables. There’s nothing wrong with being a radio show that does well on the radio, and I do understand that you’re trying to reach an audience that maybe doesn’t get Air America locally or know how to stream audio via the web. But is Sundance the right spot? I love the channel, but it’s not like they have such a huge audience.
Your current format does not make interesting television, and I don’t think you should change things to do so. I don’t know how long you, Sundance and Air America plan to keep this going, but the only thing you’ve managed to do so far is make Imus on MSNBC seem slightly less sleep-inducing. I support your goals, but this show … ugh.
Out of Focus 