New Channel Pomposity

I am a big Keith Olbermann fan, so it's hard for me to say this guy needs to shut up once in a while. All through the inauguration he was either being unnecessarily pompous or unnecessarily silly. I found it hard to listen to him. I had to change channels several times; it was zapping my last nerve.

As for all the news about Senator Kennedy, it was important. But it should not have been belabored to the point of being a downer for the day and taking attention away from President Obama. I swear, some of the stuff Keith has to say about this -- and everything else -- he meanders through 100 words when three or four might do.

The same thing was going on in the parade, but this was where he was being unnecessarily silly, all the belly aching about how slow the car was going, whether Obama wanted to walk or not, blah blah blah. It made me wonder, wouldn't it just be more helpful if they shut up? (I would've watched on C-SPAN but my cable reception on C-SPAN is very grainy.) It was nice for a while over on CNN, when Obama was walking, that all the pompous CNN folks shut up for long enough for us to enjoy the scene without trivia and exalted interpretation.

As for the racial angle of what this day means, that was also overdone to the point of being nauseating. Poor John Lewis can't get within a mile of a microphone but someone is asking him to put it in context vis a vis Martin Luther King, Jr. He's very gracious and very good at doing it. After you've heard it a few times you have to think the news business is given to too much cliche.