When it gets dark I tow your heart away

Tim Cavanaugh | September 13, 2006

Thanks to commenter John for steering me to this incredible picture of Rita "I'm Nancy Grace but on MSNBC" Cosby's brush with the greatness that is John Mark Karr. Thanks to The Corner's Kathryn Jean Lopez for posting it. Thanks to Andrew Breitbart for hosting the image. Thank you, America, just dig the image:

I urge everybody to rent The King of Comedy tonight, and see if Rita Cosby's action shot isn't a perfect mirror of that movie's opening-credits shot, wherein crazed fan Sandra Bernhard tries to attack Jerry Lewis through the window of his limo. The telling difference being that even Bernhard's "Masha" would at least have regretted making such a spectacle of herself in front of her idol. MSNBC's gravelly voiced peroxecutor, on the other hand, was exceedingly proud of this picture, showing it off to her viewers again and again, as if to proclaim: "LOOK! I WAS THIS CLOSE TO AN OBSCURE LOSER WHO DIDN'T ACTUALLY KILL JONBENET RAMSEY!" If some Neil Postman revenant wants to come back to argue that the corporate media's race to the bottom is amusing our culture to death, I will, this one time, concede the argument.

Comments

|9.13.06 @ 6:20PM|#

Rita Cosby gives me agita.

|9.13.06 @ 7:29PM|#

Isn't she the really dumb one who is very obvious when she reads off of the teleprompter?

I don't understand how she got the job.

Legwork like this, I guess.

|9.13.06 @ 8:37PM|#

Not to mention her voice sounds like Lou Rawls with a head cold.

|9.13.06 @ 8:40PM|#

Not to mention her voice sounds like Lou Rawls with a head cold.

|9.13.06 @ 9:23PM|#

I thought the expression went "deer in headlights." It missed.

|9.13.06 @ 9:45PM|#

If some Neil Postman

I'm sure gaius marius would have a field day with this snapshot. It would be tough to argue against.

|9.13.06 @ 9:46PM|#

I am surprised the person to her left was not jumped and beaten suspecting he was an exploding camera bomber.

And the cops eyes "Rita Cosby and a camera bomber, yikes"

|9.13.06 @ 10:18PM|#

Not to mention her voice sounds like Lou Rawls with a head cold.

We call her "Mrs. Ed."

|9.13.06 @ 11:41PM|#

at least the king of comedy is intentionally funny.

|9.13.06 @ 11:50PM|#

In the future everyone will be infamous for 15 minutes

|9.14.06 @ 1:41AM|#

The driver, caught at last for the first time in the lense of the media panopticon, at last allowed into the emotional matrix of television after a lifetime of jealous spying, at last allowed the feeling that his life is really real, is disappointed, and feels intead of the womblike warmth of the tube the acute irreality of everyday life, the falsity of the all-before-now, of the world of which he now sees the media bared as a part, not an alternative, and he responds to this existential crisis with a crushed rage, an impotent aping of Serial Mom, while Cosby's cameraman, watching, as ever, responding, as never before, seeks escape, a murder of the already-dead mundanity of life-via-viewfinder, and of life itself, via reference to the killing eye of 2001, pointed, as in Kubrick, at the spectator rather than at the characters we never really believe it sees, and Cosby, caught between these two, them changed and she adrift, not knowing anymore how to act as a path between them, and between them and us, finding her job for once, finally, impossible, mutely points in panic to both King of Comedy and Wild at Heart (with her orgasmically splayed hand), revealing herself, for once, finally, as one among us all, another hollow cyclinder through which cultural detritus is fired randomly into the air, while the passenger and the hatted amateur photographer gaze, as we do, both through and away from the frame, the moment, the world itself, knowingly, afloat, like surfers, like us, like channel-surfers, on a seething sea of intertextual tensions which [...]

Baylen|9.14.06 @ 9:52AM|#

You missed the part where, at her blog, she posted about "starring" into Karr's eyes. Of course, according to Rita, he "starred" right back.

The Rocky Mountain News ran an awesome caption under the photo: "John Mark Karr, center, is taken back to the Boulder County Jail Monday as MSNBC TV reporter Rita Cosby presses her face against the window of his transport vehicle." More.

|9.14.06 @ 10:03AM|#

"Peroxecutor" is an ingenious coinage.

Larry A|9.14.06 @ 10:22AM|#

Please, God. Don't let the two of them breed.

It's for the children.

|9.14.06 @ 11:37AM|#

I would certainly call that the "crazed ferret look."

|9.14.06 @ 6:40PM|#

Forget Rita Cosby, where can I buy an American flag bucket hat?