The Media (or, Everything Is Fine! Part III)

If your name is Romney, your "controversial" religion will be the subject of every interview and a thrice daily anal probe until you are forced to give a speech on the subject. Your loyalty to the country will be called into question. You will be forced by every reporter in the nation to prove over and over again that you are not a kook. Your opponents, in your own party, will be forgiven for saying hateful ignorant things about your beliefs.

If your name is Obama, whose pastor (the man who performed your marriage and blessed your children) is, to any fair minded person, a race-bating, hate mongering anti-semite, there might be a slight, surface glossing puff piece on your religion, but the press in general will agree that it must be a non-issue and consent that even to mention your (otherwise completely unimportant) middle name is off limits. Journalists (Chris Matthews to Jay Leno) will be allowed to call your speeches tear-inducing "religious experiences" without their neutrality being called into question.

If your name is McCain, you will be propped up as an important aisle crossing moderate--until you secure the nomination, at which point you will be the subject of a sloppy batch of half truths in the paper that ostensibly endorsed you.

If your name is Clinton, you'll be thrown softballs (by everyone except Obama). And as actual news programs stay out of the closet where you keep all the information other candidates are willingly revealing about themselves (e.g. tax records, donation sources, where the corpses are buried), Saturday Night Live (a comedy show with a fake news program) will endorse you almost weekly without any regard to equal time for your opponents. As former staffers look around for a place to tell the stories of how you treated them as less than human, The Daily Show (again: A COMEDY SHOW POSING AS A NEWS PROGRAM) will go out of its way to make you look almost human. (It almost worked, but John Stewart is merely a comedic genius, not a miracle worker.)

Look, I'm on record as saying it doesn't matter who is president. I honestly don't care, so all this praise I'm heaping on our news sources is a little moot. Neither am I an expert on journalism. (Sure, I'm the one who broke the story that Bush was dumb, but despite that piece of groundbreaking reportage, a blogger is NOT a member of the media.)

I'm just happy the news media are fair and the citizens are well informed.