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FROM THE PHONE BOOTH: The Smallest Space in  Hollywood

	FINEFROCK

Old News, Same Olde News
Same Ole Politicus Animus
by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 4/14/08

Here’s an informative news analysis:
 
“The session of Congress beginning tomorrow may not do much – a little bread and a few circuses – but it may well vote a 5-cent increase in the gasoline tax, the idea being to repair highways, bridges, and so on, and to put some of the unemployed back to work. Practically everybody says it’s a nice idea. But the Democrats want to spend the money where unemployment is highest; the Republicans want to spend the money where the repairs need to be made. And the two are not always in the same places. … And nobody knows how many of the unemployed know anything about building bridges, roads and tunnels.”
 
How much has changed in the 26 years since ABC’s David Brinkley noted this assessment to the national audience of “This Week”?  And how much have things changed with Georgie Porgie Stephanopolous as TW’s replacement of Brinkley as the show’s host?

The answers are damned little, and too damned much.  And all the same, oh just the same, old wine in new skins, and old whine in nude skins. Georgie the political operative made ‘legitimate’ as a news personality – never to be allowed at ABC, or CBS, or NBC, or PBS, for a conservative operative.  This little boy in Brinkley’s Big Man’s Shoes reveals much about ABC, and of the media in general – degenerated and demoralized and deconstructed, as shown in every single broadcast day that Georgie stands before the cameras, swallowed whole in the hole left by the shoes of David Brinkley.
 
And Congress?  Republicans?  Democrats? Still the same story: jobs ‘created’ by taxing money from the real Creators of Wealth – working, sweating, worrying American workers and entrepreneurs – to transfer into gummint programs designed to reward friends, punish enemies.  And take ‘credit’ for all good that thus emanates. That scheming porcine story being the tale of democrats.  Republicans then, as Brinkley attests, during the early Reagan administration [dems controlled House, GOP the Senate], wanted effectiveness to be the acme of measurement for expenditure.
 
Then came Newt; then went Newt; and in came earmarks and Mark Foley and out went the GOP majority, and one must regularly wonder if the GOP was any better than Brinkley’s 1982 House democrats. One can only hope things will be better, at least a bit. Brinkley added this coda: “And, inevitably, it’s another pork barrel – with members of Congress using their knees and elbows trying to get the money spent in their own districts.”
 
Of course, the GOP certainly is better – even if marginally. The temptations of life reach into the medulla oblongata of the rightwingers as fervently as lefties. The GOP resistance to temptation is not total, but measurably better than lefties’ active, enthusiastic, unembarrassed joy at succumbing to such sin. At least on our side of the isle, we recognize it as a political sin. For dems, it’s the Holy Grail to just let it all hang out – including the reaching in to others’ pocketbooks.
 
Oh, that Brinkley were filling his shoes today, in place of Georgie Porgie – his acerbic, and growing conservative, commentary would put some sagely sanity into the mix. George Will is useful, but a mere appendage on TW: Georgie’s deference to Will is very brief, and other TW panelists are more often than not all-liberal, often interrupting Will at will. That rude tactic never happened for Brinkley – either during the panel, and most assuredly during his closing-segment commentary.
 
These 26 years later, it’s all the same, all the time, but different in the quality of the news ‘professionals’ who bring it to us. As Heston’s death marked the passing of the last giant of Hollywood’s Golden Era, each week’s edition of “This Week” reminds us of the intellectual and professional Lilliputian who has taken the ‘place’ of Brinkley. And the puny runts of Congress, some Republican but mostly Democrat, continue to make our money their plaything, so as to convince us that they are doing ‘for’ us that which they believe we can’t do for ourselves.
 
More bread and circuses – our bread to pay the clowns to fill the center ring of the circus in Congress. And even bigger clowns bringing us the ‘news’ while asking us to believe they are ‘fair and balanced’ at ABC News. As the unemployed likely know nothing of building bridges and tunnels, Congress and Georgie know nothing of basic economics. At present, the prescience and presence of McCain in at least admitting he knows little of economics makes him a giant: an example of the one-eyed man is king in the kingdom of the blind.
 
Politicus Animus – the political animal – is unevolved these two-plus centuries. Adam Smith noted it often, an as have others since his crucial 1776 guidebook. He was fighting British economics distorted into mercantilism: the state rewarding friends with monopolies, guaranteeing their ‘rent seeker’ desires with gorgeous profits, protected from competition. Smith & Brinkley: what a pair that would make today. The mercantilist failure of the East India Company made world economics the cause of our famed Boston Tea Party – King George attempting to guarantee that favored corporation a profit to save it, and its Parliamentarian shareholders [!], from virtual certain demise in the world marketplace competition.
 
The tea went overboard, and some Patriots’ tactics went overboard on certain occasions. Their efforts would be useful today, to yank the leash on Politicus animus: BEHAVE, boy, behave.  Tax less, spend less, dictate less, take less credit for what others have striven to produce – let that nickel tax remain with the wage-earner and profit-creator. They will spend it more effectively than government can ever even dream of accomplishing.
 
Brinkley knew that. Congress rarely does. And Georgie never will. ExileStreet

copyright 2008 Steve Finefrock

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