Beat the Press, Indeed

Hillary Clinton done come to town and had herself a fundraiser, which did pretty well I hear. Barack Obama, who might as well just be (D-Chicago), had a fundraiser the same day and he made slightly less money.

Now, in the olden days, when journalists thought of themselves as educators of the public rather than administration stenographers, readers would likeley never have seen this rather pedestrian and unenlightening fact. But, this is the age of hysteria, and therefore all local news publications and broadcasts were shrieking this week about how "Hillary Beats Obama on His Home Turf!" "!!!!" "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

An actual journalist would never have reported this.

Obama has had several large fundraisers here recently, and his take in Chicago from multiple events has to be in the millions. Hillary Clinton, in her lone event, raised less than $1 million. The "story" isn't a story at all if you know that Obama has been in Chicago to drum up donations multiple times, and Clinton's been here a big fat one time.

The angle most outlets have chosen to pursue on this story, though, is that this is Obama's "turf" and Hillary is just some New York Jew Liberal Commie America-Hater who waltzed in and handed him his ass. Well, maybe not the Jew part. But the people doing the reporting work mainly for the Republican/Crazy Chicago Tribune (an organization so fundamentally un-American that it can't even assemble a decent baseball team!), the Tribune's TV station, CLTV, and the only-slightly-less-retarded Sun-Times newspaper. So basically, everybody got to see the story this week, because Chicagoans are about as smart as cows and don't demand better media.

Well, Chicago: since I know you all obsessively read my blog (and, to my largest bloc of new readers, que onda? Bienvenidos a mi blog!), all 3 million of you, you might just all take a second and recall that Barack Obama is our senator, but he's not actually from Illinois. Hillary Clinton, as everyone outside River North (the location of the Tribune and Sun-Times offices) knows, is from Park Ridge, Illinois and was born right here in Chicago.

I know what you're thinking: yeah! Fuck that goddamn interloping bitc--Oh, what? Jeez, how could all those "reporters" have missed something so relevant to the fake story they were making up and peddling as hard news? Shouldn't somebody get fired for wasting all that ink and everybody's time with a bogus tabloid headline?

Basically the week's news consisted of this, this crappy pile-on after the made-up "fact," this, and innumerable similarly inane idiocies. (Deepest apologies for not finding the original Sun-Times and Tribune articles, but I am not made of Google searches.)

If only there were some kind of war going on, with lots of tragic deaths to report; or a famine somewhere; or the housing market was tanking and millions of people were facing utter ruin; or the president were some enormous jackass/lame duck deserving of ridicule and the press' deep scrutiny--that would surely limit the time so-called journalists could spend writing stupid things.