In The Case of Anna Nicole Smith, Please Cut Out The Chase

As you may have noticed - and hell, hopefully appreciated - I've been trying to practice an Anna Nicole Smith Circus-Free zone. That this woman's death is the same catastrophic, more-foolish-than-humanly-possible train wreck her entire adult life seemed to be makes me sick. My sympathy, however, is reserved only for her five-month-old daughter, but not because she lost her mom; sadly, I suspect by the time the girl was three, had Vicki Arthur (Anna's real name) lived, the little girl would have been raising her.

Three points make me raise the issue. First, I am aghast at how the story of a woman who never did a moment's useful anything in her life is all-consumed by the mainstream media. We appear to be on the brink of war with Iran and all I hear about is Judge Larry Seidlin, the former Bronx cabbie who presided over the Florida court case to determine where Anna's dead body should go.

Second, last night, Saturday Night Live did a parody of Wolf Blitzer and his Situation Room handling the Anna Nicole Smith saga. It was OK, up to a point. But the skit, with Darrell Hammond as Wolfie, gave FAR too much credit to Blitzer for trying to regain control over his own program. Wolfie has been so blindly consumed by this story that even Lou Dobbs gladly bitch-slapped him one day on air by announcing that on Dobbs' show, there would be NO talk of Anna (someone told me that CNN itself cut into Dobb's show that night for an Anna Nicole "still dead" update but I cannot say with certainty this happened).

We got satellite reception back from the Valentine's Day 38-inch blizzard for the first time on Thursday and man, I tell you... I apparently had missed NOTHING because between the three so-called news channels, I saw 8 Anna Nicole "specials" listed in a two-night period. WTF?

Third, I just had the most annoying email exchange with someone who someone made the gargantuan leap that, since Anna Nicole Smith got illegal methadone prescriptions using the fake name of Michelle Chase while pregnant (illegal because law forbids a prescription written to a pseudo ID), that somehow I must know Anna Nicole because the name of my blog - and indeed, my last name - includes the name Chase. Now, with a leap like this, I'm fucking amazed this person could figure out how to contact me via email. But he or she did.

Anyone who is paying much attention at all to this pathetic piece of garbage passed off as fluff... well... whoa...

Bob Herbert: "From Anna to Britney to Zawahri"

Bob Herbert certainly gets today's media - and those willing to buy into their brain drain - correct with this piece you can read in full here:

Have they buried Anna Nicole Smith yet?

Are you kidding? Ms. Smith may be dead and rapidly decomposing, but there’s too much fun still to be reaped from her story to let it die just yet. This is world-class entertainment: Larry King, “Today,” CNN, The New York Times.

Even the judge in the televised hearing over what to do with Ms. Smith’s remains is milking his 15 minutes, like Judge Ito of O. J. Simpson fame. In a burst of wisdom from the bench, the judge, Larry Seidlin, said, “Like a Muhammad Ali fight, sometimes you have to wait the whole 10 rounds.”

When we were kids we were taught not to laugh at people who were obviously mentally or emotionally disturbed. With Ms. Smith, who was deeply and unmistakably disturbed, we put her on television and laughed and laughed. Would she say something stupid, or spill out of her dress, or pass out in public from booze or drugs? How hysterically funny!

Then her son died. Then she died, leaving an orphaned infant daughter. Instead of turning away chastened, shamed, we homed in like happy vultures. Whatever entertainment value Ms. Smith had when she was alive increased exponentially when she was kind enough to die for us. Now she’s on the tube around the clock.

The story, as they say, has legs.

There are other stories out there, but they aren’t nearly as much fun. The Times reported on Monday, for example, that Al Qaeda is getting its act together in Pakistan and is setting up training camps in an area that, apparently, we don’t dare trespass in.

According to the article, “American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan.”

The article went on to say, ominously, “The United States has also identified several new Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan, including one that officials said might be training operatives for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan.”

I imagine that there are a fair number of television viewers and newspaper readers who have trouble distinguishing the relative importance of celebrity stories, like the death of Anna Nicole Smith, from other matters in the news, like the reconstitution of forces responsible for the devastating Sept. 11 attacks.

Read it all here.