Ted Turner's Purity Of Essence, Revisited

Back in September, we looked at Ted Turner’s wild interchange with Wolf Blitzer on Ted’s old network. Blitzer somehow managed to walk a tightrope between being deferential to his former boss, but also realizing that Turner was sounding mad as a bloody March hare (as Group Captain Mandrake once said of General Jack D. Ripper), as Turner uttered lines such as these about North Korea:

Well, hey. Listen, I saw a lot of people over there. They were thin, and they were riding bicycles instead of driving in cars. But I didn’t see any brutality in the capitol, or out in the DMZ. We drove through the countryside quite a bit to down to P’annumjom and Kaesong. We traveled around. I’m sure we were on a special route, but I don’t see…there’s really no reason…North Korea’s got enough problems with their economy and their agriculture. I think they want to join the Western world, and improve the quality of life for their people, just like everybody else. And I think that we should give them another chance. It doesn’t cost us anything. They already have agreements, and then North Korea never posed any significant threat to the United States. I mean, the whole economy of North Korea is only $30 billion dollars a year. It’s less than the city of Detroit. It’s a small place, and we do not have to worry about them attacking us.

(That’s just a taste; read the whole thing, it’s the very definition of incredible. Unless you’re the L.A. Times, of course.)

Turner’s deeply analytical recollections were the “Quote of the Year” at the annual Media Research Center Dishonors Awards this past Thursday night. I attended last year’s awards (I felt almost obligated to after witnessing a year’s worth of media dissembling during the 2004 presidential election), but couldn’t make this year’s roast.

Fortunately, Mary Katharine Ham and Ian Schwartz did, and they’ve each posted a round-up of the highlights, along with plenty of links.

Note: Above video of Turner was added to YouTube by the Blogosphere’s own Kevin Aylward, who has his own thoughts on the MRC Awards and Turner’s mad soliloquy.