Posted 12:03 PM by Gene

It hasn't escaped our notice that news hacks have generally congratulated their activist brethren in supposedly getting Lou Dobbs to resign. It's typical of the hacks that they've only looked at the last six years of his despicable career and haven't considered he WHOLE MAN. For two decades he was a cheerleader for big business. We still recall the "Lollipop Lou" who used his Moneyline as a Chautauqua tent in which to showily parade all manner of CEOs, and ask them softball questions, never demeaning their godhood; he had Chainsaw Al on almost as often as commercials. Where was the driving populist spirit then? For some mysterious reason this changed -- possibly because he saw the future of cable "news" in screaming. (Possibly also he saw that Jim "BOOM! BOOM!" Cramer was specializing in screaming himself and he realized cable "news" couldn't have two business screamers.) And in screaming he was exceptionally well-qualified; no one doubted his prima-donna temper, the littler the target the bigger the tantrum. Surely his conflicts of interest were celebrated; we suspect whenever MOUTH OF THE SOUTH heard of them he jacked up Lollipop's salary. No, Dobbs is an actor and a villain, and that the hacks ignore this and concentrate on their own political happiness shows they're in a realm even more shriveled than Lollipop's. In short, you shouldn't have to be a liberal to be happy about Lou Dobbs.

Or to put it another way: Think of Lollipop as Paul Kangas with an ego and an attitude and it's instantly apparent how silly this debate is.

And the notion that PEOPLE WARNER's waste of bandwidth did this to boost its sudden bonafides as a "centrist network" is absurd on its face -- especially when explained to us by hacks who consider themselves centrists.