I Think I May Be on to Something...

You know the more I read, the more convinced I am that there's something not quite right about Sully's fascination with Me

The signs all point to this being a colossal practical joke: a prodigious act of self parody. The self important bitchiness is laid on a bit thick, don't you think? That's what really has my Spidey sense tingling: no self respecting journalist would allow himself to look so foolish .... unless, of course, he was having a bit of fun at our expense and - in the process - slyly making a serious point about the dangers of drinking too deeply from the well of partisan rancor.

If my suspicions are correct, Sully has enlisted quite an impressive cast of co-conspirators to help him deftly skewer the irony impaired.

Exhibit A: You can't tell me this wasn't intentional. We all have our political biases, but surely they're not so powerful as to render our brains inoperative?

Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:

“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”

Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”

But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,’ written by Barack Obama.”

Oh, snap! See what I mean? Can you blame me for suspecting Sully's fine Italian hand in this deft tweaking of our sensibilities? Sully's fairly screaming at us, "Please.... someone... anyone... GET THE JOKE!"

And then there's this delectable piece of satire, disguised as faux cluelessness:

Later in the segment, after commenting about Palin's lack of experience, Lopez stated, "I mean, the concept of Todd Palin being a stay-at-home dad-listen Joy, when I was a kid, those guys were called bums."

"Uh-huh. They're still called bums," agreed Behar.

And don't try to tell me liberals are so threatened by Sarah Pie that they will gladly sacrifice their most cherished notions of female emancipation on the altar of political whackjobbery. They may not agree with conservatives, but surely they have some principles.

No, the only sensible answer is that Sully is playing a huge joke on us. The alternative is to believe he's so consumed by hatred that tongue in cheek comments from Amazon.com become harbingers of an age when visceral emotion obliterates common sense:

"So what if Sarah Palin didn't write this book? Even God used early scribes to write the Bible," - Moe Hong, a commenter on Amazon.com.

And if you later come to your senses and realize that hatred made you too gullible, you can always blame your intended victims:

I think Moe Hong was engaging in satire as well on reflection. But who knows? That we even have to ask suggests how deeply fundamentalism has infected our consciousness.

Dear God. I hope Sully doesn't believe I'm actually a uterus. I don't even have fingers.