THEY DON'T REPORT, I'VE DECIDED

If the Today show still had these
co-hosts, I'd be watching every day.

 It isn't easy avoiding news, especially when living in a one-bedroom apartment and married to somebody who needs to catch up on the fresh disasters of the day. Gayle King, the Morning Joe gang, or even our local Channel 1 all-news channel -- my wife needs her morning bad information ritual as I do my cup of coffee to wash down her breakfast. That's when I find myself on an early morning grocery run -- thank God Whole Foods opens at 7:00 a.m. -- or doing crossword puzzles in the bedroom for an hour or so.

But like an alkie passing by the neighborhood bar or a junkie running into his friendly dealer, lately I've been settling in on the couch with that second cup of high-octane caffeine, marveling at humankind's inability to be human. Maybe it's to confirm my belief that not willingly submitting myself to daily torture just might be a good thing. 

This is what hell looks like. Only worse.

Something else that hasn't changed, apparently, is reporters who don't ask the right questions. Wouldn't it have been refreshing if the moderator of the next Republican presidential "debate" asks, "What do you have to say about former President Trump calling for the execution of Gen. Mark Milley? And please answer without using the sentence, 'I'm not here to litigate the past, I want to look to the future.'"

The phrase "Biden trips and falls" is the new
"Florida man."

Then when the candidates ignore those ground rules, the moderator would interrupt with, "OK, let me throw you an easy one. What would you have say if President Biden had called for the execution of Gen. Milley?" At the first sign of equivocation, the moderator would pipe up with, "Clearly, you have nothing of seriousness to say, so this farce is over" before throwing it to a commercial. (And just to play it straight down the middle, reporters could also ask Democrats, "What would you have thought if Joe BIden were a Republican -- would his stumble-bum antics been acceptable for a president?".)

Another thing that bugs me are reporters who either forget anything that happened before yesterday or are too young to know a little thing called "history". In 2016, Trump called for women to be executed for having abortions. In 2023, he says it's a losing issue for the GOP. If a reporter confronted any Republican about that startling turnaround, I missed it. 

Amazing what a French accent can do for a guy.

This nonsense isn't unique to politicians. Super ugly French actor Gerard Depardieu has, as they say, broken his silence about 15 charges of rape that he allegedly committed over the years: "I have never, ever abused a woman. Hurting a woman would be like kicking my own mother in the stomach."

Now, my memory isn't what it used to be. Still, that comment jumped out a me like a jacques-dan-la-boit. Because I knew it was a lie, thanks to his own comments made in 1978 and reprinted in this 1991 Washington Post piece: 

M. Depardieu has a very sordid past. He trotted out more of it than he should have in a 1978 interview that was recently resurrected in Time magazine by Richard Corliss, who asked the actor about his gun-toting, thieving childhood. "What of his story that at 9 he participated in his first rape?" Corliss asked. " 'Yes,' he {Depardieu} admits. And after that, there were many rapes? 'Yes,' he admits, 'but it was absolutely normal in those circumstances. That was part of my childhood.' "

After the Time magazine story broke, there were the initial denials and then finally last week Depardieu's publicist acknowledged that "he's sorry, but it happened." Perhaps the most damning part of Depardieu's public pronouncements on his life as a rapist were in the 1978 interview. He said there were "too many {rapes} too count . . . . There was nothing wrong with it. The girls wanted to be raped. I mean, there's no such thing as rape. It's only a matter of a girl putting herself in a situation where she wants to be."

That's a pretty big admission. Yet 13 years passed before he originally talked about it and when it was mentioned again. Now dig this: I found Depardieu's I-never-touched-those-women bs this morning on Deadline, which is supposed to be a dependable show biz news site. Yet the writer of the piece, Melanie Goodfellow, didn't take the 10 seconds it took me to Google the original 1978 quote. Why investigate when it's easier to copy press releases? 

I took one, count 'em, one journalism class in college before deciding it wasn't for me. How many do today's journalists take?

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