Anderson Cooper Sucks Balls!

Normally, the people who bring us our cable McNews are so steeped in professionalism and obsessed with meeting strict, self-imposed standards they forget that they need to sprinkle all that weighty fare with the levity of a lighthearted, childlike tee-hee every now and then.

That's why it was so good to share a giggle with Anderson Cooper, Ali Velshi and David Gergen last night on AC 360 in their discussion of the Tea Party tax protests:



Of course, light-hearted riffing on "tea-bagging," or some variation thereof, has achieved full-fledged meme status within the past couple of days. The normally self-serious Rachel Maddow and guest Ana-Marie Cox delivered a segment well spent on the subject, and Keith Olbermann, that exemplar of journalistic and personal integrity, featured the term two nights running, with the "tea bag" tally running well into the hundreds.

Maddow, Olbermann and Cooper are especially in need of fun and frivolity at the moment, if only to take their minds off the fact that they're all getting pounded in the ratings. Unfortunately, gravitas is not much to Americans' liking, no matter whether such seriousness is an objective reality or only a empty claim. They may have professional perfection to purvey, but as far as the public is concerned, they're just selling sedatives. To put it more succinctly, nobody's watching them. (Present company probably excepted).

Cooper's show, in particular, is really taking it on the back end ever since Glenn Beck took his act over to Fox News earlier this year. Say what you want about Fox and Beck, and I reckon a lot of what you say would be true, but the question is, What does this tell us? What it tells us is that there is or was enough to this tea party business to make people stop caring what the Coop, Maddow or Olbermann had to say. Talking up the protests to Cooper's former viewers has been quite a coup for Beck, and it's only a matter of time before AC360's sponsors start to follow the money. It seems unfair, but that's the way of things sometimes. It's enough to make a really serious news reader to feel like he's been rode hard and hung up wet, as we used to say in the South.

They've got to somehow win all those rubes and those advertising dollars back. That's why it's so important for Cooper, et. al to answer Fox's tea party distractions with jovial incessant references to "tea-bagging." That is, if they want to continue to claim the mantle of professionalism.