On the way to work this morning, I listened to a bit of the conservative Glenn Beck show on AM radio -- every once in a while I do that, just to hear "the dark side" for myself. Actually, Beck's kind of likeable, sometimes. Pretty self-aware about how obnoxious he is, and seems to have a heart.

This morning, he was complaining about having suffered exactly the same treatment at the hands of CNN's Soledad O'Brien, in an interview about Monday's debut of his new show on CNN. She quoted one of his more obnoxious moments (comment about 9/11 families' whining), took it out of context, then asked, "Is THIS what the tone of your show's going to be like?"

That would be the 'liberal' media in action. Zahn demonstrates the other. What's going on here? The media as mommy?

This is why I don't watch mainstream media anymore. I get my news online, blogs, NPR, and The Daily Show. I can't take these cable news channels anymore!

The way I see it, Ray McGovern was grinding an ax for all of us who will never have a chance to take a day off from work, travel to some fancy venue, wade through the mteal detectors and rent-a-cops and ask hard questions of somebody who should have been asked hard questions a long time ago by the Conventional News Network.

Ray McGovern was grinding an ax for those of us disgusted with a ruling clique that is peeing on us and telling us it's raining. He was grinding an ax for everybody who feels that their intelligence has been insulted by the White House and by its lapdogs in the White House Correspondent's Association.

And he was grinding an ax for 2,400 guys and gals in uniform who died for Rumsfeld's lies.

If only Zahn's questioning of Ray McGovern was reflective of the tone and type of questions asked of Administration officials and supporters we might never had started this war in Iraq. The MSM are longer journalists; they are advertisers helping the Administration with its product placement.

I remember well when I heard Rumsfeld on the radio in 2003, shortly after Baghdad had been taken, stating that he knew were the WMD's were. And I remember my disbelief at the casualness with which Rumsfeld stated, several months later, that he didn't think we were going to find WMD's in Iraq. Not to mention his statement postulating that the WMD's had been moved to Syria (remember that one?). The original statement was spoken almost as an afterthought. It seemed to me as if Rumsfeld was attempting, either consciously or not, to lay the groundwork for the Administration to slowly back off from and disavow the lie it had exploited in order to sell the war to the American public.

Obviously, the Secretary has difficulty recalling words which he spoke three years ago. After all the BS and propaganda he's spun during that time period, I'm not surprised.

How much ass do you have to kiss? It's sickening how quickly the press grouped McGovern with the "hecklers", as if he was some college kid throwing a pie at Rumsfeld. I don't know much about McGovern, but his tone and answers in the interview were dead on, and he had every right to ask those questions, probably moreso than most of the press.

When you read the whole transcript, Zahn's questions sound a lot less objectionable because McGovern handled them very well, without interruption from Zahn. She threw aggressive questions and he hit back hard, honest, aggressive answers. It was a good give and take without either one of them coming off like the sort of pussy Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush look like when they get interviewed by their Fox sycophants.

Like Diogenes,who walked the streets with a lighted lantern looking for an honest man, I continue to walk the virtual streets of American television, channel clicker in hand, flipping from one "news" show to the next trying to find an honest Talking Head. There aren't any.

One day Paula Zahn's earpiece is going to fall out at the same inopportune moment that her Teleprompter quits working and America is going to see her come to a dead stop, like an unplugged electric clock.

Channel by channel, you can find her archtype: Skinny white woman, usually blonde, with that uniform helmet-like shoulder-length, staight hair to cameo her face. Ever cheerful and oh-so cosmopolitan, she could be doing tampon commercials or interviewing heads of state, it's all the same. What ever they tell her to do, it comes into her ear and out her mouth.

But guess what. It's not working any more. When there was one Paula Zahn, it was a novelty. Now there are perhaps as many as fifty Paula Zahns, eight for each broadcast and cable news outlet, and a dozen or more on Fox. Flip the channels and see for yourself.

Vacuous helmet-head white women on every channel, their heads as empty as dry gourds, mouthing crap that's fed to them by earpiece and Teleprompter.

The marketing execs "Focus Grouped" the on-air talent and found that the Great American Dumbass wants to receive their daily dose of bullshit from a Paula Zahn.

But the cognitive dissonance suffered by viewers will no longer be ignored. The news is bad on all fronts. No matter how they try to sugarcoat it, no matter how they try to maintain the status quo with Paula Zahns, the Great American Dumbass is starting to feel like he's up to his neck in shit, and it's rising.

At least CNN also showed Lou Dobbs report on the questioning of Rumsfeld and revealed that when Rumsfeld asserted that Al-Zachawi had been in Bagdhad, the the CIA agent had a response: he was based in the north of Iraq, when Saddam had no reach and was in Bagdhad only when he was hospitalized. Second later, on NBC, Brian Williams gave Rumsfeld the last word, shamefully cutting the answer.

Nice pick on the Zahn interview ... I noticed a few other things that made my skin crawl in the interview. I just blogged about it as well, but Zahn's low point was when she asked whether Rumsfeld got points for calling the guard off him. Not only did that show her bias toward the administration, but it showed clearly how little she 'gets' the freedoms that are in play here. That Rumsfeld HAD to call the guard off is more telling to me ... isn't the US a country where rational debate with leaders is encouraged?

When did that change so much that a public official has to call the guards off so rational man can finish his point? When did it change so much that the MSM would wonder whether calling that guard off meant 'points' for the official? To me, Zahn's question should have beena bout why the guard was trying to eject him in the first place ... but then again, we've been living in BizzaroWorld for some time now, it seems.