2/25/07

The bunny is currently indulging one of his rarely witnessed hobbies: media mastication.

Like all prey animals, the bunny lives in a constant state of Yellow Alert, scanning his surroundings for any hint of impending danger. Having survived this long, part of a species that was old before glaciers gouged great gashes across Westchester, Duchess, and Orange counties, he is highly adept at reading the warning signs.

And occasionally, perhaps in a spirit of vengeful mammalian malevolence, he likes to shred them.

Take, for example, Jennifer Ablan's whistle-blowing analysis of record margin buying of both domestic and foreign equities (Reuters, 2/22). Margin debt has cleared its record high of $285 billion, and just seems to keep rising. Any similarities to 2000, 1991, 1987, or even 1929? Say it ain't so, Jen! SHRED! The bunny makes all gone in a fit of lagomorphic mayhem.

Then there's Wil Hylton's aping of the Constitution's Articles of Impeachment in the March issue of GQ (hang the designer!), for the accurate but woefully unpatriotic listing of Vice President Cheney's gross violations of Federal law with respect to the cherry-picking of intelligence and his ongoing, lucrative and highly questionable relationship with Halliburton. Shred!

Don't forget the gleeful expose in VANITY FAIR by Don Barlett and Jimmy Steele on SAIC, the shadow contractor hawking "expertise about weapons, about homeland security, about surveillance, about computer systems, about 'information dominance' and 'information warfare' (p.344) to a government too downsized to deal with such trivial matters itself. Too insidious, too suggestive, too manga? Shred, shred, shred!

And let's not overlook Byron Calame's troubleshooting Op-Ed piece in today's NYT, in which the Public Editor gamely runs interference for all the nay-sayers among us (not even counting the bunnies) "who believed the TIMES was again serving as a megaphone for the White House" (E14) in its reporting of US arrangements for air strikes on Iran. Shred! Craig Unger's more detailed reporting on same? Shred! Seymour Hersh, The Man, with even more details on this from the region, due to spurt from newsstands in tomorrow's NEW YORKER? Shred, shred, shred!

If the bunny could find a way to get his mighty mandibles around TV broadcasts, he certainly would, what with CNN's saturation coverage of Anna Nicole's meltdown and Jim Cramer's braying about a Dow at 16,000 all over CNBC. A triumph of Cenozoic design, the bunny's jaws would make short work of such troublesome fodder, all of which points to carnage on a blood-red horizon.