Excuse Me While I Rant This Out

When I’m writing up the script for Hair of the Dog on Sunday afternoons, sometimes I remember what British PM Harold Macmillan said would define his tenure — “Events, my dear boy, events.”

See, I’ve got this format. Go through the Big Four* Sunday chat shows, make some quips about the highlights of each, then sum up that whole mess with an observation that’s witty, pithy, silly, or (on a very good week) all three. But sometimes events get in the way, and you end up with a slightly different show.

And even though we haven’t taped it yet, this week’s is a case in point.

Presidential economic advisor Christina Romer was the lede-off guest on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos Starring George Stephanopoulos. And, charmingly, Romer is a lousy liar — maybe the only one inside the Beltway. Now I was going to go into all this on the show today, but Romer said something so obviously, painfully, awfully, infuriatingly untrue that I had no choice but to go off on a mini-rant and wrap up the show. There was just nowhere left to take it after that.

So I’ll say now what I couldn’t include on this week’s HOTD.

Here’s about 11 minutes of her being “grilled” by Stephanopoulos on Sunday’s show. (Sorry for not embedding the video, but ABC doesn’t allow that for reasons unknown.) Anyway — watch her body language. When someone is speaking, their head usually either nods up and down or moves back and forth, depending on what they’re saying, and where they’re trying to place emphasis.

Romer’s head is all over the place. I swear, most of the time it’s moving in figure eights. To me, that means she has no clue what she expects you to get out of what she’s saying, because she knows it’s total crap. Having to go out there and spread huge fields of manure for your boss — doing terrible damage to the country in the process — is a nasty job. So nasty, I almost feel sorry for her, since she seems to have enough of a conscience to know that what she’s doing is awful, wrong, and awfully wrong. But it’s not like an Ivy League economist doesn’t have other options, so to hell with her.

Although if Romer were ever to get up the gumption to resign in protest, I’d gladly make a hardcopy of this little essay and eat it.

And if you want to know what Romer said that set me off so badly, you’ll have to watch the new Hair of the Dog. Link to follow, sometime around 8PM Eastern/5PM Pacific.

*I refuse to include CNN’s “State of the Nation” because there’s no sense in talking about a show no one has seen.