Whee – Me!

~ Okay, he was a great guy and a fine journalist and it’s Father’s Day and he wrote some book about his dad, but jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez! enough already! We get it. TV news has been all Tim Russert, all the time since Friday afternoon.

Journalists can be pack animals as much as any other gang of people. Witness their general treatment of one George W. Bush for the first four years of his presidency versus that since then. But, boy, have they circled the wagons over Russert’s untimely demise.

I don’t mean to be a crank here (alright, yes I do) but I’m merely trying to point out how easily people fall into group-think. When our mainstream news media goes on a bender we all wake up the next morning with a hangover.

I stopped in at Barnes & Noble this morning and learned that Russert’s books all sold out yesterday. Hmm. How many of those purchasers actually gave a single though to Russert’s existence in the week leading up to his death?

Maybe I’m out of the loop. (Duh. Of course I’m out of the loop; I spend my entire life trying to be contrary.) Maybe Tim Russert really was one of those celebs who’d become a member of the family. Had Walter Cronkite collapsed at the CBS studios back in 1968, the nation would’ve mourned. Heck, the world mourned when Princess Diana died in 1997. There are, I admit, people whose passing would be traumatic.

I just never figured Tim Russert would be one of them.

~ Nice juxtaposition with the opening of “Get Smart!” this week and the news that British spooks have twice left top secret papers on commuter trains in the past couple of weeks. The papers had to do with Iraq, Iran, and al Qaeda.

The new Max, top. The old Max and the Chief, bottom.

Is the British spy apparatus peopled by bumbling oafs? Or is something even weirder going on around here?

Perhaps the documents were no more sensitive than most other office communications floating around a massive bureaucracy. For all we know, spies might stamp “Top Secret” on everything from a counter-terrorism strategy to the flyer for this summer’s office picnic.

I have a hard time believing mid-level functionaries, while riding the London Tube, are reading documents pertaining to the fate of the world.

~ The Cubs just took two out of three from the Blue Jays up in Toronto this weekend. The boys continue to maintain baseball’s best record. Will the hundredth year be the charm? Should I begin preparing for the apocalypse now?

The Mark of the Beast