BobHarris.com - Annalissimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead (and So Are 1.5 Million Southern Sudanese)

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Annalissimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead (and So Are 1.5 Million Southern Sudanese)

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Friday, 12 October 2007

Watching CNN today, 11:14 am PT, as they're coming back from a commercial.

"Three of the stories we're working on..." the anchor intones, highlighting these:

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize,
Ted Kennedy undergoes surgery, and
"Eight search warrants have been served in the death of Anna Nicole Smith..."

Come on. Do we have to? Annalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, again splashed across literally hundreds of newspapers and TV stations? Thankfully, it's hardly the wall-to-wall all-else-annihilating festival of eight months ago (see the cartoon below for a quick review of other things that happened that day). But still. Aagh.

Just to review this news cycle's largest events which may have been neglected, depending on which "news" show one's eyeballs fell on, in favor of today's yellow-alert Anna Nicolitude: the US and Russia are getting notably tense. So are the US and Turkey -- and just as Turkey and the Kurds could blow up any minute, with large implications for Iraq. To the good, Israel and the Palestinians are making headway for once, but in Sudan, things blew up again badly in Darfur the other day, while desperately needed peace talks in South Sudan have now gone all wobbly, after decades of war there which have killed maybe 1.5 to two million people.

(Sadly, this last grim news was fairly predictable; southern Sudan has been in a state of civil war pretty much straight through since before independence even began in 1956, with the exception of one 11-year break that ended in 1983 and this fresh flail at peace starting in 2005. None of which I recall even hearing about until writing Who Hates Whom. Despite the death toll. And today's failure, which may set off another horrid war, seems to have gone nearly 100% unnoticed in the US press. Again. Depressed sigh.)

Almost eight hours later, Anderson Cooper (whose work I often respect greatly) and his producers chose to make the Annalissimo one of their top three lead stories as well. By evening, Ted Kennedy's bloodstream and Al Gore's award had been replaced by (a) retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez verbally fragging his former civilian commanders and (b) a police-custody death in the Phoenix airport.

Only Anna Nicole still remained in the top three.

Forgive me, but I feel compelled to repost this video, reviewing the other teensy stuff that happened on the day Anna Nicole died:

(Sources for the cartoon here.)