The Conservative Cat

The media far prefers its role as a weapon of mass distraction, one that reveled in Laura Bush's Republican potty mouth, her jokes crowding out any news of fresh hostage taking, a veritable tsunami of suicide bombings, the faith-biased initiative to kill the filibuster, the appointment of the milk-lipped meshugina, John Bolton, as well as Mr. Excitement's recent non-pressing press conference, estimated to have cost the networks an irretrievable $40m in advertising revenues; those same networks who delighted us with replay after replay of Mrs. E's barnyard humor, which caused even the otherwise upright, uptight Mrs. Cheney to erupt in paroxysms of obedient laughter.

(If you don't believe me, here's the link.)

As you read the above paragraph, there is probably an alarm bell going off in your head. That bell is a reaction to several important properties of the cited paragraph.

• It is a single sentence of over 100 words.
• The point of the sentence was over and done with in the first twelve words, slightly less than one-eighth of the way through.
• Every sentiment expressed is highly negative.
• The statement seeks to cast actual events in a particular light, but the only fact that is not general knowledge (the $40 million in lost advertising revenue) is irrelevant to the main point.

The length of the sentence indicates that the statement is a stream of consciousness rather than a careful thought. The key metric, however, is the signal-to-hate ratio, which in this case is 1:7 (in other words, 7 parts hate and 1 part information).

I'll save you the trouble of reading the rest of the article. As a sort of protest, Mr. Gelbart wants you to spend a day with no radio, no TV, no books or magazines, no movies, and no music.

Reality check, Larry: that's how the Internet happened, and we've been here a lot longer than you and yours.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat