Surprise, surprise. Barbara Walters seems to think that Sarah Palin is stupid.
Yes, America held its bated, collective breath last week. Anxious citizens waited on seat-edges, atop pins & needles, and with fingertips gnawed to bloody stubs for the Great Walters to grace mere plebeians with her list of 2008's "10 Most Fascinating People."
Though her show would be more fascinating if it were annually called "10 Most Fascinating Reasons Why I'm Even Able To Utter A Sentence, What With This Cleft Palate and All The Botox," I understand the general public's fascination with Walters' fascinations. She is, after all, a person who tamed those mythical She-Beasts known as "The Harpies" and put their odious, chattering, eardrum-splitting yaps on The View.
Barbara has also seen a lot. A person gets to know what's truly fascinating--and what isn't--when they've been alive for 472 years due to bathing in the blood of sacrificed virgins. I suppose Barbara's got a right to tell us what's worthy of attracting our interest.
Seriously, since Barbara seems so comfy in her disparagement of Sarah Palin's knowledge, I must sincerely aver that I've always found Walters to be one of the most gallingly stupid specimens ever to haunt a newsroom, a studio, or the airwaves in general. That's saying a great deal, because the media has been surfing a particularly catastrophic Tsunami of Stupid for well over a decade. Mainstream reporters, anchors, journalists, and "weather folk" have never been more incompetent. Take a gander at the 4th-graders apparently hired to write online copy for MSNBC.COM. That's all you need to do. On any given day, in any given article, one is apt to find several sentences akin to: "Putin say he hang by testicle, probably, threaten the Saakashvili," or: "American men and womens worry they're IRA's and CD's and 401K's could troublesome become pertinent?"
Sure, it's all shoddy and liberal, but Barbara Walters has been a bit shoddy and liberal for--what?-- nine generations, now? Yes, she broke ground for women who always dreamed of one day shattering news-industry glass ceilings with marshmallows and being allowed to lisp teleprompted headlines. I'll give her that. Indeed, Walters was nothing if not the self-consciously lightweight "test model" for the stereotypical newsbimbo, the prototype for blondes who really, really wanted to "maybe try something besides meteorologist." I guess someone had to do it.
Even so, where did Walters acquire this hushed, hallowed esteem that allows her to become an arbiter of The Fascinating?
I'll tell you where she acquired it: from celebrity interviews. Exactly. Yes, I know--the gravitas is humbling. The trick, at least for Walters, was that she smoked-and-mirrored her approach to make it seem as if she were a Serious Celebrity Interviewer, especially around Oscar Time.
We all know how very serious that time is.
Walters didn't ask those crucial famous-people particularly intelligent, probative questions ("If you were a tree...") but she did routinely get her subjects to cry like ninnies, and this sideshow technique fooled people into thinking that Barbara was somehow powerful and penetrating. She mattered. She mattered like Dan Rather, by golly.
The joke was on the masses, because who the hell on earth could fail to get some liberal, egocentric, pathologically insecure celeb to wail? I mean, these are people who live to boo-hoo without the slightest provocation. They get paid obscene amounts of money because they can't help showing-off their "feelins". Just mention their fathers (who justifiably hated them) and they'll sniffle up a storm. Put them in a room with a dimmer-switch and ask them about the "sadness of whales." You'll get tears, alright.
Maybe it's just me, but I fail to see the prestige or the accomplishment involved with getting someone like Goldie Hawn to blubber.
Making matters worse, Walters has gotten overeager and (even more) arrogantly bitchy in her dotage--as if Feisty Self-Absorption was some brand new surgical "lift" that only She, Baba Wawa, has been well-connected enough to discover. I think much of the blame for this stems from that horrifying View program. Setting herself up as the smug matriarch of a coven of bitter old wart-charmers like Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and Rosie O'Donnell was bound to unleash the Excitable Hag that's been lurking within Walters' soul for years.
It has.
When she's not sticking her nose upward and pretending to be the venerable Moral Authority among her panel of confused shrews, Walters clucks, rambles, and shrieks like a hen with a rotisserie-spit up its jacksie. I swear she's deranged, as if the glue-gun required to daily wrench her cheek implants up around her scalp has been sizzling bits of her brain. I'm waiting for the day she arrives on the set dressed in pink lace, ribbons, and bows, licking a lollipop and telling millions that she can "now use the Big People's toilet!"
Total systems-crash. You know it's coming.
Given this, it's hardly a surprise that Walters uses her "10 Most Fascinating People" show as a misleading and transparent opportunity to showcase at least 3 or 4 of the people who most annoy her--people she thinks she can belittle, seeing as she's some kind of Grande Dame. No doubt the old bag of crackers thought she was being quite clever by inviting Rush Limbaugh to sit down for a quick tete a tete, but it was really Rush who was clever. Not that he's wanting for an audience, mind you; Rush has 20 million listeners, making him radio's most powerful force by far. Even so, Limbaugh is shrewd enough to realize that the publicity generated by Walters' list-making might attract a million members of her daffy liberal following to his own show out of curiosity, possibly converting the few dozen that have enough sense to realize he tells the Truth like no one else in the biz.
Face it: even a dozen liberals who embrace sanity are enough to give the rest of us a glimmer of hope. Authentic hope--not Obama Hope.
Not surprisingly, Walters the Excitable and Eager tried to use the Limbaugh interview to demonstrate her leftist stabbing-skills, thereby pleasing her legitimate (cough) journalistic (cough, cough) peers and making them think fondly of her, making them love her. Perhaps even making them weep. Limbaugh, for his part, is never anyone's patsy, so I have no idea what the Walters Crone was even thinking, except perhaps for: "I pwann to edit the wivving daywights out of this wascal wabbit!"
Edit she did, but even then America's Favorite Stick of Dessicated Turkey-Jerky With An Abnormally Wide-Eyed Head failed to make a dent in Limbaugh. She "bwubbered" about Rush's new $100 million-plus contract in a time of economic crisis, as if she herself weren't raking-in gobs of cash faster than a Manhattan surgeon can suck fat from some society matron's buttocks and stow it in her frown-lines.
Rush brilliantly averred that he has declined to "participate" in the recession. It was classic.
When Rush soberly expressed his admiration for Governor Sarah Palin, along with his quite reasonable contention that her characterization by the mainstream media was probably not all that accurate, Walters felt that old "tingle" liberals feel--the tingle that tells them when it's time to interrupt and babble something hysterical!
"Oh, Wush, come on. It's because she wasn't inFOAMED! She wasn't inFOAMED, Wush!"
It took me a second as I wondered why Walters thought Sarah Palin was apparently lacking some curious infusion of suds, and what this suds-deficiency might possibly have to do with Rush's initial comment. Then I realized.
Of course, Walters was attempting to refer to the handy-but-empty liberal accusation that Palin is an idiot because, as [hard-working, successful] Governor of [crucial, oil-rich] Alaska, her world doesn't necessarily revolve around memorizing an obscure, ill-defined "doctrine" cooked-up and largely promulgated by a handful of equally obscure leftist professors who worry themselves into anemia if the martinis aren't "dirty" enough at their faculty cocktail-parties.
Too, Walters was referring to the blanket liberal condemnation of Sarah Palin based upon one chop-suey interview with newspixie Katie Couric, an interview in which Palin--knowingly caught between a vicious liberal media-machine out to destroy her every word before it was uttered and the strangling orders of her own boss to refrain from being herself--was perhaps understandably tongue-tied.
It goes without saying that a withered, overgroomed poodle like Walters would never deign to mention the inescapable fact that "dumb" Sarah Palin found a way to outmaneuver and outshine an experienced Washington windbag like Joe Biden during the Vice-Presidential debate. Oh no. Walters would never countenance the fine interviews Palin gave once she apparently felt forced to take matters into her own hands...even as Moribund McCain underwhelmed his own base to the point of narcolepsy. Walters would never give serious kudos to Palin's stirring, well-informed, and engaging speeches before thousands of galvanized conservatives across the nation.
Yes, Walters did indeed feature Palin as one of her "10 Most Fascinating People," but it was typically backhanded recognition--she also honored Tina Fey, who was genuinely funny while impersonating Sarah Palin for only about five minutes, the very first time she did it on SNL, and whose own TV-program, 30 Rock, is about as "fascinating" as lint.
One rocky interview, just as Rush Limbaugh emphasized, before Walters cut-him-off with an obvious edit. That's all the liberal media, Babs included, has got...or all that they want to have, regarding Sarah Palin. On the basis of that one ostensibly compromised interview, liberals who fear the Power--and personal integrity--of Palin the Effective Leader have tried to pre-emptively paint her as a complete idiot, just as they desperately sought to do so with Ronald Reagan, using terminology so similar it's creepy.
Possibly a very good kind of creepy, for conservatives.
After all, Governor Reagan stuck to his principles and chuckled all the way to the White House, ignoring the very same screaming-meemie hysteria and elitism that oozed like pus from the left. And America stood taller than ever under his folksy, unwaveringly conservative watch.
You see, Barbara et al., sometimes "folks" are made out of steel.
Liberals like Walters don't like the word "folks," because you can't use that word in a city, where (as we all know) everyone is just as smart as a slap across the face. The word also tends to mean "uncomplicated, reasonable people," which will never do for those types who believe the citizenry is interested in reading/hearing about the ancient, interracial, adulterous love-affairs of rickety old newsbags.
Perhaps the most amusing part of Walters' Fascination-Fest came when she took some of Limbaugh's words about the unfair treatment of women who age in the public eye way out of context.
"But Wush, you've seen me age daiwwy over the yeaws," said Walters.
First of all, it's no shock to learn that Walters is egocentric enough to believe that Rush Limbaugh has actually bothered to watch her on a daily basis.
It is hilarious, however, to discover that Barbara thinks she has aged "daily."
Oh, I expect that, if we saw Barbara without her clothes on, we'd all see something akin to the recently exhumed and unwrapped mummy of a 3,000 year-old Egyptian, but the face...now that's a different story. And in TVLand, where Walters dwells as self-appointed Dowager Empress, the face is everything.
Barbara's face has not "aged daily." In fact, I'd say her face has gone through a process that is not necessarily the opposite of aging, but most certainly contrary to it.
Walters was careful to add: "Sawah Paywin, whom you wuv, is also going to age daiwwy."
That's true. And, since that is the case, let us see to it (in 2012) that everyone gets a chance to watch how a real lady does it.
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