Griper Blade: Remember when Barack Obama wasn't 'Black Enough?'

One thing that's gotten me about news coverage of this election season is the focus on intangibles. Intangibles are those immeasurable qualities that are supposed to make the difference to voters. The King of the focus on intangibles has been MSNBC's Chris Matthews. Anyone who's read my stuff for a while knows that I don't put a lot of faith in Chris's punditry powers. In fact, I've called him a "freakin' loudmouth who spends almost as much time interviewing people on his show as he does with sentences that begin 'I think...'."

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with what he thinks if I thought it was worth something. But Matthews seems obsessed with intangibles; those things which, if we get right down to it, are trivial crap that some jerk on TV is telling you you're supposed to care about, but has probably never even occurred to you. Of course, Matthews isn't the only one who does this; it's a 24/7 news network staple. I've said it before, but talking heads talk -- even when they really don't have anything to say. Dead air is bad TV, so during a lull, a TV pundit's greatest skill is pulling crap out of his ass.

Let's take a little trip back to about this time last year. The big question then was, "Is Barack Obama black enough?" In fact, run a Google search for that question and it returns 106,000 hits. Sure looks like a stupid question now, doesn't it?...

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