Posted on 10/31/2002 4:56:41 PM PST by PJ-Comix
Aaron Brown thinks a lot of himself and sees the world through the e-mail he receives. On Wednesday night he decided that he’s “annoyed at both political parties,” adopting the FNC slogan as he boasted that “you can’t be more fair and balanced than that.” The reasons for his ire: One party misused the memorial service for the late Senator Wellstone while the other was responsible for Brown having to endure a dozen identical e-mails complaining about it.
Brown began his “Page Two” commentary, at the start of the October 30 NewsNight on CNN, by saying that “calling it a memorial insults the dead” since it “was totally tasteless,” but he called the sending to him of a few identically-worded e-mails, complaining about what the Democrats did, “equally shameless.”
Brown concluded that both the misuse of the memorial service, attended by thousands and viewed by at least hundreds of thousands if not a few million on TV, was of no more importance than how he personally was annoyed by a few e-mails from lazy people. He gave both events equal weight: “So here is what last night proved: One side can be tasteless and the other side has the computer skills to cut and paste under the guise of genuine outrage. Which is worse? To me it’s a tie.”
Brown’s self-centered “Page Two” commentary in full:
“I find myself at exactly the right place for a reporter tonight. I’m annoyed at both political parties. And you can’t be more fair and balanced than that. Last night’s event in Minneapolis -- calling it a memorial insults the dead -- was totally tasteless. Democrats have every right to celebrate Senator Paul Wellstone’s life in any way they choose. What they don’t have a right to do, it seems to me, is create the impression they are going to do one thing when the plan all along was to do something else. Inviting Mr. Wellstone’s former Republican colleagues was the right thing to do; booing them was not. Whatever happened to Minnesota nice? Local TV carried the event live because they believed it was going to be something other than a pep rally. They were fooled. It was all pretty shameless.
“Equally shameless has been the reaction received here. There may in fact be non-partisans upset with the event, they may in fact exist. They did not make themselves known in our in-box today. Instead, what we received was a series of identical letters. I counted at least a dozen and then got bored. I don’t mean thematically identical; I mean literally identical. Word for word. Now there are two ways to look at this: It was either the most remarkable coincidence in the history of the world that a dozen people would send word-for-word the same letter or this was just a silly organized campaign by people who wouldn’t have voted for the Senator for all the lutefisk (?) in Minnesota.
“So here is what last night proved: One side can be tasteless and the other side has the computer skills to cut and paste under the guise of genuine outrage. Which is worse? To me it’s a tie.”
It sounded like “lutefisk,” but maybe a Minnesotan can clue me in on what Brown, a Minnesota native, was talking about. Some kind of fish, as in “lutefish”?
To send an original, self-written, non-identical to any message from anyone else e-mail to Brown, go to the NewsNight Web page. Under “Contact Us,” which is on the left side beneath a picture of Brown, you’ll see a link to an e-mail submission form: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/aaron.brown/index.html
[Web Update: Several CyberAlert readers have kindly described “lutefisk” for me. It's a fish after it has been soaked in lye. One sent along this definition from dictionary.com's citation from the American Heritage Dictionary:
“A traditional Scandinavian dish prepared by soaking air-dried cod in a lye solution for several weeks before skinning, boning, and boiling it, a process that gives the dish its characteristic gelatinous consistency.”
Sounds disgusting, but if you want to whip some up, another reader passed along a Web page describing how to make lutefisk: http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/3227/recipes/luteing.htm
But don't on tasting it anytime soon. It takes two weeks.]
In Aaronbrownthink, an act of terrorism is no worse morally than sending the Sacred Aaron Brown a few critical e-mails.
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