Super Bowl Nation

Our relentless worship of wretched excess will be the thing that brings us down. Although I have spent most of my life in college towns chocked to the goalposts with football manias and classic rivalries, I haven't watched a Super Bowl in a decade or two. Football is far and away my favorite of the traditional spectator sports, but my disgust with the overblown everything that has become so indigenous to American culture easily overrides any attraction I have to watching a few touchdown passes on the tube. Although college football has certainly followed in the cleated footsteps of pro ball, at least there is still a bit of emphasis on the actual sport still left in the average college gridiron matchup. Needless to say, I haven't watched any pro ball in a number of years, but the ultimate sporting barf bag is what the Super Bowl has become. It used to be about football. Now, as with practically everything else in America, it is only about money, a wretched excess of money.

Now that I have your attention, let me say that I don't really care that much how overly commercialized the Super Bowl is because no one is making me watch it. I can tune in the Ole Miss - Alabama or the Longhorns - Aggies rivalries anytime I want a football fix. What I cannot abide, though, is CNN's superbowling of the only cable television news we get aside from the right-wing-with-a-bullet Fox News. MSNBC may offer Olberman's rants, HBO gives us Bill Maher in limited engagements during parts of the year, and Jon Stewart does his half-hour best every night, but the enormous number of lying turdblossoms from the starboard side of this Titanic bellow their bull patties for many hours of every day! CNN is all we have left, and at least a little honest, investigative reporting is certainly called for, but noooooo. All they give us is more wretched excess.

The best kept secret in America right now is that the biggest threat to the future and security of the country is the Wicked Witch from Wasilla, and CNN is most certainly in on the scam. The media power brokers want to see a clash of the titans on the news as if the news was a Super Bowl, and that is precisely all they care about. John Edwards gets an expensive haircut and they treat it like the Breaking News of the Day and the Special Report rolled into one giant story. He has an affair and you'd think the Watergate Hotel was back in the news. The witch has an affair and they don't even mention it. All my cats even recognize the name Reverend Wright, but the witch's two witch doctors have only been on the air a couple of times! The Ayers name has been aired a ridiculous number of times concerning events that happened when Obama was barely old enough to spell politics, yet one of the ringleaders of AIP taught her how to develop her deceptive political positions and helped her become mayor! How many television-watching voters who never do any research on the internet even know the name Mark Chryson? How many know that the craziest of the evangelicals have been patiently waiting for the date 12/21/12 to kick off their own version of the Super Bowl?

CNN, you are as complicit as hell in this charade. Ted Turner is not. You obviously could not wait to get rid of a leader with scruples so you could propagate this madness onto the public. There are a few honest talking heads still at CNN. David Gergen is one, but he seems to be getting lonelier every day. The rest of you should join the witch in hell with Rove, Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, and the cast of thousands known as fair and balanced pundits. It is quite unfortunate that you cannot be prosecuted for what you say simply because you don't say it. The entire problem emanates from what you don't say. It is your silence on the subject of the most corrupt politician in American history that is the crime. It is your dodging with semantics and your fake compassions that are despicable. You do just enough to look like you are soooo much more honest than the fair and balanced competition. Edwards wasn't even a viable candidate when you chose to take him down, yet the Hitler monster in a skirt just keeps rising up like Jason and you keep acting as if you don't even see the Queen Bitch Alien rising up behind Ripley, waiting to take a monstrous bite out of America's democratic future! It was bad enough when we had Reagan with his genial personality, but at least Sam Donaldson made a heroic effort to keep Howdy Doody Face honest. This new queen of the last frontier encourages her followers to scream kill him and all you do is to mention it politely a few times.

The only bright ray of light I can see in this nightmare is that at least you will probably never get what you really desire, the ultimate Super Bowl of news, The Catfight of the Century between Sarah and Hillary. I know you wanted it. We all know that everybody likes to watch a catfight and that's all you are, CNN, purveyors of voyeuristic news and commentary. You could care less about the future of America. This fact could not be any more obvious. If this was not true, you would be promoting an honest, college-football-style rivalry between intellient leaders with honorable intentions and opposing ideologies. If you gave a rat's ass about the future of America, you would use your bully pulpit to steer American voters at least in the general direction of honor, integrity, and humanitarianism. You would help lead us toward a brighter future in which we all learn from our past mistakes. Your goal is not a stronger, more united America. Your goal is to raise the price of your salaries and your book deals. You don't really care which team wins the game. You care only how much the commercial time cost per minute during the game. A few years from now, you'll be throwing up your hands and acting innocent, as if you had never known a thing. You will be so shocked that America could choose a leader who is less intelligent and more dangerous than George Bush, and your cash register will ring again, louder than ever. The wretched excess goes on....