Small blessings to count on a midweek winter morning, from Tom Junod at Esquire:
I watched the inauguration on Fox News. I admit there was some perversity involved — I wanted both to tremble with outrage and to gloat. I also wanted to remember why I liked Barack Obama, and there is no better way of liking Barack Obama than watching him on a network that pays people to hate him. His first term was questionable in many ways, but one thing was certain — he wasn’t them. He wasn’t Brit and Megyn and Brett and Chris, with their grievances and their grudges and their hurt feelings, and he wasn’t the man they were still half-heartedly defending, Mitt Romney.
Has anybody else besides Ann Romney mentioned Mitt Romney’s name since November 6? Has anyone watched Fox? The network once thought to be integral to Karl Rove’s “permanent Republican majority” now has to live down the election-night memory of Rove standing in the schoolhouse door between Megyn Kelly and the announcement that Barack Obama had won a second term. Roger Ailes created a news network designed to elect presidents, but he built it upon his own immortal and immortalized sense of injury, and now that he “lost” the election, the sense of injury is all that’s left.… Roger Ailes does one thing very well: white-guy disgruntlement. It’s a potent force, when there are enough disgruntled white guys. But now that the demographics are turning against him, all Ailes can offer is a fulfillment of his own paranoia…
(Some of you may be too young to catch the ‘standing in the schoolhouse door’ reference, which I thought was pretty damned perfect.)
Apart from jeering at nasty old overprivileged white men, what’s on the day’s agenda?