CT Blue

There are times when I feel like beating dead horses, mostly because there are very few live horses left to beat. So, let us return to a recurring theme: media “balance”.

If future historians ever spend time watching old television news shows, they will surely wonder why so much TV time was devoted to getting the opinions of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two mediocre men who have, at least to this point, had almost zero effect on what has happened in this country and this world, and who are chiefly remarkable for having been proven wrong about almost every assertion they have ever made.

Now cometh Chuck Todd to tell us that though Lindsey Graham cannot muster enough support from the lunatic fringe to even make it to the JV debate, he “will not be silenced” because Chuck Todd is going to give him yet more airtime to demonstrate why even Republicans find him wanting. He is going to discuss “his strategy going forward”. If Chuck were around in 1876 he’d probably have interviewed Custer on the same subject. Might I suggest that Graham’s best strategy would be to gracefully exit the race, or perhaps gracelessly exit the race by saying he didn’t make the cut because though he is clearly as incompetent as the competition, he is not as clinically insane as the rest of the field.

But I haven’t made my point about balance.

Did you know there is a person running (I think he’s still running) for the Democratic nomination whose support is as wide and deep as Graham’s? His name is Lawrence Lessig. He’s a Harvard professor who is drawing about the same percentage of support as is Graham. Lessig does differ from Graham in one crucial respect: he is not always wrong about everything. Now that’s unfair to Lessig, it’s more fair to say that he is similar to Graham in only one respect: he has no chance of getting his party’s nomination and everyone knows it, including him.

Amazingly, despite Lessig’s snowball chance of getting the Democratic nomination, he is not a regular on the Sunday talk shows. In fact, he is pretty much ignored by the media. Now, I’m not suggesting the media should do anything but ignore him; I’m merely suggesting that as between the two people under discussion, he is actually the superior individual, so if the media (and remember, we’re not talking about Fox here, Todd works for a network that some sane people watch) is going to subject us to Lindsey Graham’s strategizing about his hopeless cause, shouldn’t we be hearing about Lessig’s strategy too? I would submit that at least Lessig would have something different to say; something Todd’s viewers have not heard a zillion times before. What is it that the beltway bozos see in people like Graham, and why is it that they seem congenitally unable to appreciate the fact that the rest of the country doesn’t see whatever they see.