Be Of Good Cheer By: Mark W Adams

Frank Rich writes.

You read.

No excerpt can do it justice. It's all good.

It makes putting up with the insipidly shallow Maureen Dowd in her quest for yet another tiresome metaphor describing the primaries almost tolerable -- almost.

Broadcasting Frank Rich across the intertubeZ is enough to justify releasing Dowd from behind the old NYTimes paywall, but if you want to read the best take on the primary process, be thankful that the Times also printed an Op/Ed by Elizabeth Edwards today that reminds both Rich and Dowd that not everyone can really inform themselves about the important issues this election hopes to resolve by surfing the web, but most people rely on the media to tell them more than just who can bowl better.

Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden’s health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama’s bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.

Edwards' critique of the vapidity of media control of the election process is profound, and startling that the Times would give it such a broad platform. Unfortunately the media has learned nothing from it's cheerleading the war as it uncritically regurgitated White House talking points that proved fictitious, to it's current fixation on flag pins -- the spawn of in-depth analysis of what John Kerry put on his cheesesteak and Al Gore's preference for earth-tones that so tickled Dowds fancy.

Yep, sandwiched in between a spot-on, issues-driven election analysis by Rich, and a searing indictment of what the media does so wrong and so irresponsibly in covering these things by Edwards, is MoDo's dissection of Hillary and Barack's eating habits on the campaign trail, carrying on a tradition of dumbing down America -- a bright signpost that reads: Vacant.

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog nails the zeitgeist at the Times today:

In the print Times, this op-ed appears on the same page as Maureen Dowd's latest column -- and in a just world, the very presence of the Edwards column would make Dowd's column crawl off the page in shame. But that's not to be. Dowd is the proud embodiment of everything Elizabeth Edwards quite rightly despises:

Now guess which one of these three was invited, along with Broderella, to the Sunday bobble-head shows this morning.