Harry Shearer, the best political satirist out there, knows exactly what's wrong with the NYT. This is some of his song, Miss Run Amok
(Jagged Edge's Girls Gone Wild):
I'm the queen of
the newsroom,
my colleagues I greet with gloom.
They came in with a new
broom but me it couldn't sweep.
I'm the one they had to keep 'cuz I've got
the access.
When I'm around the Veep relaxes, ignores taxes and just
leaks.
I'm the open ear he seeks.
It's through me the leakage
courses.
I got all the secret sources.
I was in the armed
forces,
embedded up to here, wore the uniform to cheer
and to back up my
supporting I even dabbled in reporting.
Miss Run Amok, that's what
they call me at the paper.
I'm capable of any caper till I run out of
luck.
Miss Run Amok.
Not the name I write under but my words crack with
thunder.
Till you wonder what I'm smoking or sucking
'cuz the plums I was
plucking
had to come from something more than pluck.
From Miss Run
Amok.
I'm the queen of the newsroom
the one they couldn't not
groom
Even though I wrote "Valerie Plume" or was it "Flame"?
I can't
remember. Taking notes is such a drag
each word a dying ember
Who said
what and when
It's not my bag. What's then is then.
So I'm a pal of
Chalabi.
He had a tall tale or two for me.
Some say I should have checked
it out, showed some doubt
but if I'd put him in a cage, put a hold on his
outrage,
kept his notions off the stage, pulled the curtain,
only one
thing is certain:
no matter how prudent or sage,
I wouldn't have made the
front page.
There's more and it's all just as dead
on. You can hear it here.
And if you really want to laugh, check out the 10/9 episode of Le Show, Shearer's weekly radio broadcast. At around thirty three minutes, he's got a Dick Cheney: Confidential about the VP office spy scandal that's fall-down funny.
Cheney's voice: "There are no leaves around the secure, undisclosed location. So the only way the approach of autumn impinges on my finely tuned consciousness is the dropping of shoes. The Iraqi Constitution was one of the those little pieces of conceptual footware. I tell ya' Sysiphus didn't have heavier lifting. First we got'em to sit down together, then to avoid all sorts of deadlines enshrined in Jerry Bremer's neat little transitional law deal they had to avoid actually reading the full text of the Constitution to Parlaiment. Then change the rules to make it harder to defeat. And then the week, Mr. John Bolton couldn't keep the hairless Yorkies at the U.N. from yapping up a storm, we had to get our Iraqi friends to change the rules back again. All this while the Constituent in Chief was busy doing his Look How Much I Care About the Gulf Cost Tour. Plus, with Mick Brown doing a heckuva less of a heckuva job, I had a whole new pair of arms to twist over at FEMA to make sure the construction contracts weren't subject to the unconscionable delays of competitive bidding. But those were just someone else's shoes dropping in the autumnal breeze. And some of my own were hitting the floorboards. ...
The Le Show link goes to HarryShearer.com, but it's easy to find your way to the Le Show archive with a few clicks. It's worth it.
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