Please, Please, Please...

... will someone, anyone, punch-- forcefully and repeatedly-- Lou Dobbs in the throat? Pretty please? With sugar on top?

Luckily, up here in Canada, we don't find most of the worst American faux-populism on our airwaves. But Dobbs, somehow, makes it across the border, with his revolting, and often downright racist, jingoism that in less-tolerant countries would be regarded as hate-news. Every night, it's the same old story: how the politicians are fucking everything up, which is harmless enough in itself; but then it's The War On The Middle Class and Broken Borders and Border Betrayal. He's the putrefying voice of self-righteous, contemptuous, xenophobic America, which, thankfully and mercifully, is not the real voice of America to anyone who actually knows even a single American. He's the living manifestation of bourgeois injurement.

And yet, many cleave to him as a messenger of news, not least of which has to do with his time-slot at the 6pm hour on CNN. I hope that audience is just the O'Reilly and Limbaugh company feigning diversity.

Every day, I thank God, Darwin, or Ray Charles that reportage, generally, is left in the hands of actual reporters. (Watch people like Dana Bash when they have to "report" for Lou: you can see them choking back the desire to argue with the Dobbsian spin.) I'm glad-- heartened-- gleeful-- to say there's no real version of O'Reilly here in Canada. No Limbaugh, no Dobbs. You get a few such types on radio, mostly out of Alberta or working for the Sun, but they're never given the full credentials of a legitimate journalist.

"Newsmen" like Lou Dobbs are anti-newsmen. They're polemical, cynical, jingoistic provocateurs; they're the most despicable pretenders toward anger, so satisfied as they are in proclaiming their anger and rattling on about "wars" on this and that.

In Canada, you'd never see any credentialed network proclaim something like "War On The Middle Class." You'd never see a report on how Americans are "killing" our jobs. You'd never see given legitimation the passed-off racism that regularly qualifies as journalism on Lou Dobbs Tonight.

Lou is hate, contempt and anger, without solution. He's also smarm. He deserves exactly what he issues--- and a few dozen shots to the throat.