Saturday Evening Comin’ Down

No time for blogging this evening (tm Dr. Zaius)!

I'm off to stand in line all night with tens of thousand of other fans for tickets to the media event of the decade!

Against all odds, David Gregory

has somehow managed to do the impossible: finally score that once-in-a-lifetime on-camera interview with the notoriously reclusive Saint John McSame. So rare a thing it is, that “Meet the Press” has broken with 50 years of journalistic tradition and put an "!" after the word "Exclusive" in their advertisements of the show.

Oh, wait.

Maybe I got this wrong.


From "Washington Monthly" a year ago:

DAVID GREGORY: This is your 54th appearance on Meet the Press. Now I know you're a competitive guy. Bob Dole still holds the record at 63. And so we've been doing the calculations here. We think we can make this up, maybe within a year's time. If you're game for that.

JOHN MCCAIN: I'd love to try. Thank you, David.

DAVID GREGORY: Sen. McCain, thank you very much for being here.

David Gregory was making a joke. And yet there's still much to this that's remarkable. John McCain has appeared on Meet the Press - just one of the multiple Sunday morning talk shows - 54 times, and I would guess that most of them have come in the years since announcing for President in 1999, since before that he was a more obscure figure in Washington. I can't imagine there's anyone else even close to that number. And yet McCain is an easy guy to find on the Rolodex and get to appear on your show. It points to a staleness in the official discourse.
...

I should mention at this point that McCain lost the 2008 Presidential election.

Apparently what finally did the trick this time was returning one of Senator McSame’s 1,755 phone calls demanding to be put on teevee immediately so that he could try to undo some of the damage he did by opening his mouth on Thursday and revealing himself yet again to be a bitter, thin-skinned, malinformed loser.