Faux Channel Gets Pwnd

If you want a great thrill, I recommend taking the pleasant step of telling your travel service that you have a special requirement from your reservation, that there be No Fox Channel in your room. Yes, that felt good. And it's now official, it's in my email requirements. No.Fox.Channel. I have been known to ask the management to change the channel before, but this is official.

Try that out for fun. Achenblog has nailed the same feeling in yesterday's column. Thanks, Mr. Achenbach.

After Obama's presser, I clicked on Fox News, where Bill O'Reilly and Karl Rove were huffing and sniffing and snarling and wheezing, emphatically unimpressed by the president's performance. Fox needs to go with a different team there. The double dose of middle-aged white-guy dyspepsia is overkill. And those two are strong medicine even when solo: It's like teaming Genghis Khan with Attila the Hun.

Obama struggled, seemingly straining to see what it said on the monitor directly in front of him -- why can't he just speak from notes for once? -- and he still has that tendency to be windy. (I don't agree that he was "boring," as Drudge puts it in this morning's big headline.) But he also delivered some memorable lines:

"It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak."

"I have no investment in causing controversy. I'm happy to avoid it."

"We're not immediately going to get Middle East peace. We've been in office a little over 60 days."

"This is a big ocean liner, its not a speedboat."

The most important moment may have come in his opening statement, when he defended the profit motive: "[T]he rest of us can't afford to demonize every investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit. That drive is what has always fueled our prosperity, and it is what will ultimately get these banks lending and our economy moving once more."

Were I his speechwriter, I would have added, "Greed is good."

You know, just to roil the blogosphere. Make some heads explode.

Some might say Obama can be a bit pedantic, to which I'd say: Um, is that bad? I learned some things from The Professor. I didn't know that AIG selling a derivative would be counted as part of the GDP. (And yet a volunteer's labor assisting the elderly, or planting trees in a boulevard median, wouldn't be counted as anything, is my guess.) I assume he misspoke when he said the majority of our recent economic growth has been in the financial sector -- because I think he used the 40 percent figure a couple of days ago -- but whatever, it's a lot, and it's been illusory.

It's hard to look rational when all you can do is rail against one of the most sane people in D.C. So far as I can tell, no one in the right wing press has tried, yet.

Join me in telling the management wherever you are staying or eating; no Faux news, no propaganda allowed.

This is going to be a great trip.