Today's headlines: Bush Babbles, Steph Stiffed

It takes some serious chutzpah to decide to move up the time of a rare prime-time presidential "news conference" so that it pre-empts the most popular show on the network your administration is trying so hard to destroy. But that's what C-Plus Caligula's handlers decided last night when they moved the planned 8:30 presidential babblefest up to 8:00.

Sam Seder is right; you do NOT want to watch this stuff without the Majority Report team playing the roles of Mike, Crow, and Tom Servo. What's even more fun is to turn on the TV with the sound down and let Sam and Janeane do their thing. Every time I see George W. Bush on television, I feel the kind of embarrassment ordinarily reserved for the kind of unabashed promoters of their own mediocrity that used to appear on The Gong Show (a.k.a. American Idol's granddaddy), and for William Hung -- which is pretty much saying the same thing.

But watching a blotchy-faced Bush, hunched over like -- well, if the shoe fits -- a chimpanzee, clutching the podium as if it were life preserver, babbling the same talking points about Social Security is failing, freedom is on the march in Iraq, and his good friend Vladimurr, it was actually hard to feel contempt for him; it was more like embarrassment that enough Americans, most of whom will never set foot NEAR the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center used to stand, were still so scared shitless of terrorism coming to their small towns that they gave this guy another four years to wreak havoc on not just this country, but the entire world.

What this means is that the next year and a half, and November 2006 in particular, are going to be very interesting. With Bush's approval ratings currently in the mid-40's and sinking like a stone, and Congress faring even worse, with approval ratings in the mid-30's, one wonders if even rigged Diebold and ES&S voting machines are going to be enough to keep the Republicans in power. And even if they are, will Americans buy the results of the midterm elections? And if they don't; if Americans finally wake up and realize the bill of goods they've been sold since December 12, 2000, what will they decide to do?

But if you managed to stay sane until Bush was finished floundering for his own political life, you got to see Stephanie LaGrossa, the new best damn Survivor player ever to not win the game (de-throning the reigning holder of that title, Rob Cesternino), intimidate her new tribemates enough to be the latest casualty -- and leaving with class. Steph in 2016, I say.