First, by way of venting and expressing regrets, I'm in an aggravating rut: I can access Salon, but not letters/comments, at work. It's a temptation I am definitely better off without, but invariably when I get home, I'm too beat to read through the comments, etc.

With that caveat, or whatever the hell it is, I'd just like to observe that I've always found Charlie Rose too smarmy and supercilious for comfort; as Glenn notes, this is a subjective perception, and your mileage may vary. (Offer void in Tennessee.)

And I think he reflects a teevee News Personality that is nearly universal in the class of infotainwhores, as I've dubbed them. It's a quasi-bully persona, or at least a "one-up" persona. Despite the modern custom in teevee talking heads shows of eschewing hierarchy in favor of horizontal panels or groups or round tables, it's as if the host is hovering a couple of feet above the guest. Or else is prone, squirming, and panting at the guest's feet.

Because the polarity of this stance flips. If a guest is Famous, and generally considered to be an Esteemed Person of Power and Importance, Rose and his ilk are typically deferential, meek, and focused on showing off for the benefit of both guest and audience. Sucking up to power, as usual, as someone correctly noted above. (Closet Queen Tweety Matthews adds his own peculiar psychosexual twist to this Uriah Heepish obsequiousness, and indeed each infotainwhore has an idiosyncratic style.)

Contrariwise, if the guest is more pedestrian, or a figure of controversy or perceived weakness or inferiority, the infotainwhore rediscovers the Inquisitorial Mode of interviewing. The "Sixty Minutes" correspondents have followed this formula from day one-- one minute Steve Krofft is hammering some mortgage company CEO, the next minute Morley Safer is rimming Judge Judy for a quarter of an hour I'll never get back.

To me, the pervasive practice of treating the powerful with 'umble respect bordering on adulation (and crossing that border, as often as not), along with getting tough and aggressive to lower-status guests is pretty much the classic polarized schoolyard bully archetype. ("Archetype" is different than "stereotype"-- it's classier, for one thing.) Kiss up, kick down.

Obviously, I share the title proposition. And it becomes clearer and clearer that the corporate media factories, besides manufacturing consent, also continuously pimp and hype nonsense as if it were significant and compelling, like pranksters scattering ball bearings on a dance floor. The oligarchs and kleptocrats in power promote a Future Shock environment, in which so much sparkly crap is continuously injected and percolated throughout our pubic discourse that everyone's permanently off-balance.

Sorry if all this was covered when I was out of the room.

The Democratic leadership’s entirely predictable, and utterly reprehensible, gracious acquiescence to the Mukasey nomination is only one instance of the nominally opposed political elites making common cause in the name of comity and moderation.

The spectacle of Democrats Feinstein and Schumer fluttering around the nominee, while not unremarked upon, didn’t especially trouble the corporate media infotainwhore commentariat. And the self-styled “pragmatic” partisan Democrats were happy to strew these charlatans’ path with the usual flower petals of accommodationist rationalization: Mukasey was, after all, the “least evil” possibility; rejecting him would have only meant that an even more blatantly malignant person would be offered by the uncompromising criminals occupying the Executive Branch– got to pick one’s battles, after all, keep the powder dry; and above all, avoid the trap of Making the Perfect the Enemy of the Good.

I guess we should be grateful that these treacherous villains aren’t shedding their own crocodile tears for greenlighting still another odious miscreant. I’m certain that politicians are permanently convinced, one way or another, that they’re always doing the best they can, and are striving to find the best solutions possible (with emphasis on possible) to complex and intractable problems.

Their modern consciences are self-cleaning, like ovens.

Coming late to the thread after a hard day's night, only to belatedly cross-post a comment I made at Media Matters in response to another commenter who characterized Scarborough's critique of Obama's bowling as "good natured ribbing".

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"[G]ood natured ribbing"? I have to disagree. Maybe if Maverick of the Living Dead was the bowler-- Scarborough and his fellow corporate media infotainwhores would've spun the lame showing with smarmy affection-- Maverick's Got Game! Attaboy! For he's a jolly good fellow!

From the ginned-up derision about Gore's "earth tones" (and the abominable Dowd sneering that he was practically "lactating") through Kerry's windsurfing and asking for an uncool kind of cheese (Swiss) on his cheese steak, there is a settled practice in the US corporate media of emasculating (male) Democratic candidates.

Whether Scarborough consciously and deliberately joins the chorus, or just drifts into it by absorbing the infotainment elite meme, it's hardly an isolated or anomalous reaction. The rule is to "humorously" or "facetiously" demean any promising (male) Democratic candidate, by reinforcing the message that the candidate is a big pussy who runs/throws like a girl. (Not to mention closet queen Tweety Matthews, who adds his own idiosyncratic psychosexual spin in defining Manly Men-- he's probably more interested in how Obama's bowling shoes smell.)

The purpose of this superficially "good natured" derision is to diminish and undermine the candidate's appeal and attractiveness using a "death of a thousand cuts" approach. It's unfortunate that this transparent subliminal seduction is rationalized or blown off as insignificant. And it's probably effective beyond the 25% or so of the Amerikan population who are more or less wingnuts, mired in primitive, lizard-brain proto-thought.

BTW, I'm not an Obama supporter, although to me it's obvious that his intellect and character is of a far higher caliber than the competition.