Last night was a great night for Ann Romney, women, love, respect, Krispy Kreme and clip-on ties. Amazing things happened. Ann Romney connected with everyone who has ever been forced to move back home and live in their parents’ basement and subsist on Hamburger Helper and tuna noodle casserole. Chris Christie almost made everyone exercise. Ted Cruz proved that you don’t need a podium to capture an audience’s attention and not entirely because they were concerned he was going to topple into the press pool. Rick Santorum still thinks he ran for President.
Everyone was happy and hopeful and upbeat and loving everyone else and wearing red.
Well, everyone except the news media, who decided to take the opportunity of the first night of the convention to take all of those witty quips they came up with while half drunk on Miller Lite during the hurricane and put them to good use in their post-speech analysis.Or, alternately, act like drunk monkeys whose work is not seen by millions of readers and viewers across the globe.
A children’s treasury of press behaving badly:
- Juan Williams decided to call Ann Romney a “corporate wife” as though that’s a thing that’s not entirely insulting, and as though that’s a thing, just generally. How do you tell a corporate wife from, say, a small entrepreneur’s wife, or a limited liability partnership wife? She wears a red dress and looks like Ann Romney and, apparently has an entirely different scheme of economics than the rest of America, or the world, or Juan Williams or something. Because it’s not like Juan Williams is, you know, a millionaire or whatever.
- Someone on the ABC webcast of last nights speeches got caught on a hot mic “joking” that Mitt and Ann Romney were happy “to party while black people drowned.” Which is both an implication that Mitt is a racist and racist in itself, if you think about it. That person turned out to be David Chalian, who is Yahoo News’ DC bureau chief. Or he was. Now he’s probably next in line to take over for whoever is currently failing to attract viewers to Current TV.
- MSNBC would rather it’s viewers’ delicate sensibilities not be shocked and outraged at the presence of minorities at the RNC.
Tonight will probably be no different, but given that angry stereotyping on live television has cost at least one person his free media meals, it might be slightly less likely to occur again. At least as unlikely as Harpers accurately reporting a Ron Paul floor protest. Which is unlikely.
