Tina Brown at the Cleaners

Tina Brown, ex-big thing in mag publishing now reduced to a much-mocked, little-read Wash Post column and the cable equivalent of porn (once-weekly, ne'er-watched CNBC show, Topic A, which resembles nothing so much as a Second City TV skit) may want to get a new dry cleaners. Or hope to hell that the "undecided airheads" she frets will settle this election really don't read the newspapers.

In her latest col, Brown pronounces that the election "is probably not going to turn on something important." Nope, says La Brown, it will rest on "some dopey, misappropriated sound bite that cuts through to the undecided airheads." Brown then discusses the Mary Cheney screwup of the "elegant, stentorian" John Kerry and the latest about Bill O'Reilly's phone sex preferences (on full-frontal display at the invaluable The Smoking Gun), noting that "part of the frisson of docu-porn is knowing that we are all one click away from an e-mail or cell-phone leak from our own personal theaters of embarrassment."

Brown then closes out her column by gratuitously insulting the self-evidently moronic bimbette she encounters regularly at her dry cleaner's:

At my local dry cleaner after the last debate, I encountered a young female undecided whose political mood swings I have been unscientifically tracking. "Made up your mind yet?" I asked brightly between gritted teeth. "Well, Kerry had the best facts," she replied distractedly, "but I'm sort of drifting toward Bush.'' Huh? "Well, Kerry telling the world Dick Cheney's daughter was a lesbian was, like, really unfair." No time now to point out that it was Dick Cheney, not John Kerry, who reminded the world of this fact on the campaign trail. Put your money on it: Airheads are going to be the definitive swing voters on Nov. 2.

Whole thing here.

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