Even as one who is literally noncommittal regarding Obama, I agree with the others that pouncing on this coincidence is indeed a cheap, bogus, and sensationalistic grab for attention.

It's like interrupting a toast at a wedding reception to report that a fly was just seen buzzing outside, and there's no telling if it'll end up in the wedding cake!

Not to mention the irritating fact that the putative observation, however slight and speculative, of an alleged "interruption" of a "uniformly positive news cycle" is a self-fulfilling statement, insofar as it's expressed in-- yes!-- a news (or at least a "media") story that is an interruption of the positive news cycle.

Next time take the day off and maintain a dignified silence.

• It may not be a very full theory, but it's delicious and it really hits the spot! Please, may I have some more?

• Someone recently sent me a short NY Times article in what might be called the Oliver Sacks genre, though Sacks wasn't mentioned.

I'm too lazy to retrieve it, but it was about scientists researching specific causal relationships in brain activity vis-à-vis perception/appreciation of sarcasm. That is, it's well known that illness or injury rendering certain areas of the brain defunct can cause the patient to lose the ability to comprehend sarcasm, or similar expression and language that depend on the observer's ability to simultaneously perceive and interpret para-linguistic cues, e.g. facial expression, tone, etc. in a normal manner.

I suspect that a similar deterioration has occurred in our corporate media celebrities, particularly those who have advanced to "Dean" class. In colloquial terms, it may well be irreparable neural damage that renders Broder, from a normative perspective, "clueless" and unable to "get it".

And it occurs to me that maybe we ought to take advantage of what may prove to be the "final throes" of our criminal, neo-liberal, neo-monarchical totalitarian government. We're Through the Looking Glass, in a dystopian Bizzaro Wonderland where habeas corpus is extinct-- mummified and immured in a vast edifice of malignant draconian legislation; where a Trojan Horse named "Homeland Security", containing a thousand travesties, depredations, and atrocities in its hollow belly, awed, seduced, or subdued the Little People, even as it disgorged its hellish cargo upon them.

Before the cleansing and restorative rains sweep across this lunar landscape, it might be wise to revive another once-discredited tool of scientific medical investigation: vivisection.

So by all means, let's hale The Dean into the finest research facility in the U S of A, and have at him. I expect confirmation of my hypothesis that, like the sarcasm-deprived, we will find that the prefrontal cortices of our most celebrated infotainwhores are tragically scarred, twisted, and withered: Occupational Cluelessness is to journalists as Black Lung Disease is to coal miners.

This might be a good time for the Executive Branch misfeasors to launch that attack on Iran, because the posthumous Russert media glurge will divert US public attention.

In my ongoing fascination with the dicta of blog censors, I expect sites like Huffington Post to enforce the sententious piety about Not Speaking Ill of the Dead. They'll either delete or close comments to avoid "unseemly" and "disrespectful" observations about Mr. Russert's timely-- er, premature-- demise. At least banning comments completely avoids the predictable chiding from conventional folks: "Hey, c'mon guys! The man dropped dead, for God's sake! Whatever you may think of his character or work, show a little respect and class..."

Here, we are fortunate to have a broad-minded and thoughtful host who does not feel obliged to subscribe to a Miss Manners standard of "niceness" and enforce it with censorious and puerile deletions.

Still, I'll close with as positive a remark as I can make about the deceased: Mr. Russert, sir-- I only wish it had been Rush Limbaugh. Or Bill O'Reilly. Or even Barbara Walters. Or Katie Couric! I really do.

Respectfully in turn, I take your point.

FWIW, my objection is to the Hall Monitor mentality which seeks to pre-empt free expression, in part to create a phony universal or collective response to an event which is actually very personal.

Put the opposite way: the unforgettable photos and newsreels of the weeping throngs attending FDR's funeral train reveal the real deal. Real, genuine, personal, honest individual grief rises up, and the media of the day reported it.

Now the cause-and-effect dynamic is reversed: the media lets loose a tsunami of scripted grief-responses, and the audience obligingly reciprocates. This isn't to say that it's impossible to envision persons genuinely liking and admiring Russert [gack], and genuinely grieving. But that doesn't justify the Media Mourning Juggernaut, revving up even higher because the deceased was On the Job.

But I respect the attitude that somewhere under this caldera of maya are real relatives and friends who are genuinely and tragically shocked and stunned. My condolences to them.

BTW, speaking of individual sensibilities, I felt rather like you do when so much was made of Paul Wolfowitz' comb-licking, disgusting as it indeed is-- or when they mocked President Unitard for passing a note to Condi, IIRC, about needing to take a restroom break. It seemed too petty and somehow unseemly to dwell on such repellent personal minutiae.