Lou’s Not Here

I’m sure if one were to trace the lineage of one Mr. Loud Dobbs back to the beginning, he or she would find his family’s existence in North America to date back before the Mayflower, and even the lost colony of Roanoke. His family surely must have existed before any “Native” Americans crossed the Bering Strait. Certainly the Dobbs clan dates back to when North America was part of one giant continent, and surely his must have been the only family to actually have survived on this piece of land after the great quake. It must be, because that’s the only way he would be entitled to say the shit he’s been saying about illegal immigration. In the great tradition of failing television “news” personalities, Lou Dobbs has picked a hot-button issue and taken a controversial stand on it in order to win some ratings. He has spent the past few weeks whining about the immense problems illegal immigration has caused lately, and his dog and pony show seems to be working. News outlets spanning the continent (mostly CNN, Dobbs’ own network) have been talking about the controversy this man has stirred.
I have a funny past with Lou Dobbs that seems to emulate many of my first experiences with television personalities. I thought he was all right at first. I watched his show a few times, and I thought it was balanced, and that Dobbs wasn’t trying to be inflammatory, or outrageous like so many other news personalities do. They usually do this while boasting their complete lack of journalistic standards as if it was the way news should be and that whole “objectivity” thing was just a fad, something your daddy was into when he was growing up but is now square, and only for people who wear white pants and spend their time feeding the pigeons at the park on a fair-weathered afternoon. Levelheaded objectivity has no place in this world. We want infotainment, with more of a focus on the “tainment” part. But I digress, and this is an argument that has been staged a thousand times, we need not go there again unless we decide to fix it. The point I was starting with was that Dobbs seemed like a good shit there for a while, but I guess he wasn’t really blowing the advertisers’ skirts up, so he had to go medieval and it will probably work for about five minutes. After that, his ratings will plummet just as fast as they were a month ago, and Dobbs will have no preserved soul to speak of when he’s a copy-editor’s bitch in Poughkeepsie.

It takes a man to admit something like this, but I had a similar experience with Bill O’Reilly. I need to be clear that this was when he was first starting out on television and his reputation as a world-class prick had not become common knowledge. I had never even heard his name before this, so you can understand why it may have taken me a while to come around. But Bill O’Reilly was impressive to me the first time around. He violated every code of journalistic ethics in one show, but I was getting used to that. What impressed me was that I couldn’t tell if he was conservative or liberal, something that’s usually all too easy to find out, and I was relieved to hear someone who spoke their mind and didn’t cater to any one political ideology.
He covered a story about how the show “The Sopranos” was violent, but still important to watch as it carried some valuable lessons, though not suitable for children (liberal). And then he spent ten minutes bitching about a service in Las Vegas where rednecks can pay $10,000 and hunt naked women in a forest (While people in general probably have a problem with this, his argument was tailored to the conservative mind). No, they didn’t use real bullets, they used paint balls and the women would pretend to die when they were hit, wherein the men would be able to walk up to them, and inspect their quality as if they had just shot a ten-point buck. O’Reilly railed on the women who did this degrading thing, and on the owner of the company, though I think the men paying that kind of money for what is obviously a Freudian issue playing itself out on a scale the size of which we have never seen should probably be using that money on a world class team of psychologists. But as you can see, O’Reilly wasn’t promoting one political side, but his own opinion. Not too bad, eh?

But as I would soon learn, that was all bullshit. I must have caught him on a bad day, because it certainly didn’t happen again. I can’t watch for ten minutes without throwing something at the television, and I almost threw my parents’ cat last time. These guys win you over with their quaint old-fashioned ways, but then they are anally raped by the ratings-nistas to steal a line from Colbert. The same happened with Donny Deutsch, but the fact that he uses reading glasses as his way of distinguishing himself (like Tucker Carlson and bow-ties) should have been my first clue on that one.
So Lou Dobbs is on my douche bag list, which is getting pretty long. But I saw something else that made me upset as well. Two Latino radio DJ’s are offering someone $500 in gifts to name their newborn Lou Dobbs. They’re doing this in protest of Dobbs’ stance on immigration, so as the voice of the people I am obligated to ask what their point is exactly. I assume they’re trying to taunt him in some way; the idea of sharing a name with someone you despise can be frustrating. After all whenever you hear your own name, you will be met with conflicted feelings, certainly a terrible situation.
But I have to say I think this plan will backfire. I had to pay someone to name their kid after me, and it cost a lot more than $500, believe me. It was great though. I now have my own heir, and I don’t even have to raise her. I know what you’re saying, I’m not a girl. Let’s just say I should have asked for a sonogram before forking over the money. So I’m not sure what these two guys are doing, but I think they should find a better way to pick on Dobbs. Besides, he’s just the kind of conceited prick to get a god-complex from this. Who knows what kind of sick shit he’ll say tomorrow.
But I’ve been rambling, and you’re probably bored by now, so I’ll leave you with just one more thought. When the hell did the Clippers become a good basketball team? Did I miss a meeting? I’m a man of the twentieth century, and there a some things we can be sure of: The New York Yankees will always buy their championships, the Raiders will always play dirty, and when you talk about L.A. in the playoffs, you’re talking about the Lakers. So you can imagine the surprise I was met with last night when I turned on the television and saw Jack Nicholson in his usual seat, but on the wrong side of town. The Lakers were bounced by the Suns last week and now the Clippers are in the second round. It’s going to take me a few days to get my head around this, but I think in the end, my decision will be that the Clippers still suck, and no amount of playoff victories will change that. It’s like the sun rising in the east. If we wake up one morning to find the sun rising in the west, who knows what might happen. What we do know is that it won’t be pretty, and neither will my mood until this is all figured out. Ciao.