Sometimes nothin’ isn’t a real cool hand.
Tuesday, February 4th, 2020
Last night I hadn’t planned to watch that much of the coverage of what were supposed to be the Iowa Caucus results, but I was compelled, trainwreck-style, after hearing Brian Williams say to Rachel Maddow “we got nothin.” Well, he probably pronounced the ‘G’, but he was paying homage to his New Jersey origins. So if you have nothing, what do you do? I remained tuned to see.
So I stayed up late and watched the pontificators try to come up with new ways to say that the results weren’t being reported, but for me, the novelty soon wore off. And then, the politicians realized that empty lecterns were sitting there on live cable tv news channel screens, waiting to be filled, and sure enough, Klobuchar came out (first) to fill them with a vague take on what I’m sure was her stump speech. Then, Biden and Warren started doing much the same, almost simultaneously, and the cable nets made a dubious choice and stayed with Biden, as MSNBC’s Maddow promised “we’ll get Warren’s speech cued back up and show it to you right after Biden.”
No, no they didn’t. Neither did CNN. Instead, Bernie Sanders moved lecternward and because the rule that a live something, anything must be aired—a TV rule I’ve never embraced—they covered Sanders. I went to bed. If they made it back to Warren it was in the wee, wee hours.
Doesn’t seem fair to her, really.
And tonight, well, Sammy and I stuck with fiction and didn’t get anywhere near coverage of the real world. I had enough politics and I sure had enough of Our Imperial President.
If I’m disciplined, I won’t even flick through tweets in bed. Well, we’ll see.
