I Stand Corrected

You've certainly proven your point about T.V. in general being more pornographic, almost across-the-board, than it was in the past, Matt. Re-reading my post, and yours, I can't imagine what I was thinking. Maybe it was a perverse version of "remember the good old days."

I especially like the Monica quote. You could have pulled up the bit about the cigar, though. Even pornier.

The big news item today is Congress' Iraq supplemental bill that sets a date certain, though it should be the rush to toss Gonzales overboard. Despite all of his very many flaws, Bush is right when he calls the House's measure a bit of political theatre. Everyone involved knows that no similar bill will pass the Senate; and even in that extremely unlikely event it would be vetoed. Faced with the prospect of having the Army run out of money for operations, or passing the bill Bush asked for in the first place, the Democrats, neurotic about being Swift-Boated again, will cave and provide the money.

On the other hand, Gonzales is legitimately interesting news for two reasons. One, it shows that an endorsement by Bush means nothing at all. The Republicans at every level of the party have abandoned him despite a relatively strong show of support from Bush. Two, it illustrates the overall management sloppiness of this administration, which I think is, in the end, even more harmful to the country than their actual ideology. Bush has infected the career bureaucrats with whom he came to Washington with his own incompetence and passivity. As a result, even routine political punishment morphs into a legitimate scandal. It's unreal. We've been watching the federal government slowly fall apart since, if you want to put a specific date on it, Jay Garner showed up in Iraq and the infighting between Defense and State got brutal. By the time Katrina made it obvious to the average American, the disfunction of the administration was already horrifyingly clear in Washington.

To bring it back to my first post - that's why people will gravitate away from Senators in the upcoming presidential election. They're desperate not for someone to give good speeches but for someone to run the government. I've heard comparisons to Dukakis' failed campaign on that issue; but Dukakis was running after 8 years of government that was, compared to this administration, blissfully well-run. I think the Democrats need to field one of their many excellent Governors if they want to have a chance.

Restrained T.V.?

The statement that T.V. is less pornographic depends on which channel you're watching. Clearly you're not talking about Jerry Springer, The Howard Stern Show, Southpark. Oh, what about that Monica Lewinsky episode, covered in oh so creepy detail by the likes of CNN:

"According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President kissed. She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up; and he touched her breasts with his hands and mouth...He stimulated me manually in the genital area."
-Kenn Starr Report, 1995

It's all in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

Clearly these images, and some in the above listed shows are at least as "pornographic" as a Playboy centerfold, or what you get in your hotel room for $9.99. The dividing line is that many of the shows will present their pornographic moments outside a larger context of sex - a breast here, a matter of factly uttered "vagina" there. Or, even more cleverly, networks leave it up to the imagination by merely providing a scenario and simulating it. You figure out the rest. Besides, the Spice Network, Hot Network and others are all television, but maybe you don't have the Dish Network?

Porn in "family-friendly" news

I'd love to know the back-story to this. Did the unnamed station employee think he was doing some kind of Running Man "wake-up-the-masses" thing? I'd also love to know just how "hard" the supposedly hard-core porn was. Despite the growing saturation of long super-hard-core Internet video porn - and the concommittant hardening of ordinary retail porn - mainstream TV has actually become more prurient over the last 30 years. What precisely, I wonder, do the station managers consider "hard-core porn?"