The things you do because baby needs new shoes.
I would never in a million years have on purpose turned on Fox News Thursday in the “Hannity” time slot at 6 p.m. As a former Texan editor of mine used to say, “I’d rather get pecked to death by ducks” than tune the TV to that nonsense.
I mean, the ads alone! Some joker claiming you should invest through his company because it won’t invest in woke? Another joker pretending that some nose-ringed Gen Z woke cashier was forcing him to answer questions about who he voted for in order to buy clothes in America? So instead you should shop at his place, which makes no such supposed progressive demands?
To watch Fox News is to enter Bizarro World.
But watch the whole damn 90 minutes I did, because I was assigned to do it. Now on a Thursday evening at 6, you can always find me opening a beer with my weekly golfing buddies in the Brookside parking lot in the shadow of the Rose Bowl. But these days you can turn on, shudder, Fox News anywhere you can take your phone, so I set it up on the roof of my car just before 6 and told my skins game buddies to stop with the golf stories and listen up: Here’s Sean Hannity moderating a 90-minute debate between, almost unbelievably, our very own governor, Gavin Newsom, who says he’s very much not running for anything, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is very much running an increasingly disastrous campaign for president.
And, jeez, what a horrible cacophony began to issue from my little Bluetooth speaker as the three began to bicker.
“You’re talking down California and talking down one of the great American cities in Los Angeles,” Gavin says to Ron, after the latter laid into the former for — of all things — not telling L.A. D.A. George Gascon how to do his job.
Governors don’t get to tell county D.A.s what to do. Ron knows that. He went to Harvard Law School. But it’s just a talking point, and televised political debates have devolved into nothing but talking points.
No one answers any question posed by the moderator. Gavin just entirely failed to address the first question Sean sent his way, about the out-migration of hundreds of thousands of Californians in recent years. He just babbled on about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and how great — true that! — California is.
Don’t say gay, Ron? “What we say in Florida is it’s inappropriate to tell … second-graders they may not have been born in the right body,” Ron says. Then he flashes a book called “Gender Queer.” “Ka-ching!” say its publishers.
“You’ve banned 1,406 books in Florida … on your banning binge … your cultural purge,” Gavin says. “This is a ginned-up, made-up issue.”
“Your minor child can move to California and get hormone blockers … and a sex-change operation,” Ron says.
“No one can hear you,” Sean says, when the two governors then just begin yelling at each other. But — and Sean’s doing a pretty good job here, trying at least — no one can force the two big egos to calm down and take their turns.
Then an argument about the fact that, after all these years, Ron can’t pronounce Kamala, the vice president’s, name right.
“It’s not even an option,” Gavin says about whether he’s running against Joe Biden. “He’s doing fantastically.”
“He wants you to believe him over your own lying eyes,” says Ron.
In fact, there’s a lot of accusing the other of lying in these 90 minutes.
OK, I’ll join: Here’s Ron saying our state is perpetually subject to rolling electricity blackouts.
He’s lying. I’ve owned the same California house for 36 years, and we’ve never had a single rolling blackout.
“California does have freedoms that some states don’t. You have the freedom to defecate in public in California,” Ron says.
“I love the rant on freedom,” Gavin says, and then lays into Ron for very much inhibiting the freedoms of librarians and all women with his state law that is essentially a complete abortion ban.
Yell, yell, yell.
“Liberals!”
“Your attacks on the trans community!”
“When are you gonna drop out and at least give Nikki Haley a shot at knocking Donald Trump out of this nomination?” Gavin says to Ron — in answer to a question about China, sure, but that’s what happens in today’s debates.
What is your favorite thing about the state of California, Ron?
“When I got down to Coronado … that Strand … California is … really such a beautiful area. I’ll always have very very fond memories about that part of California.”
Asked the same thing about Florida, Gavin completely ignores it, doesn’t have anything to say about, I don’t know, how lovely the Keys are. He goes off on a weird rant lauding Joe Biden instead.
It’s eight minutes past the allotted time here in the Great Red-Blue State Debate, Sean says. But somehow the show is still going on. Head to commercial. Rob Lowe has a Fox drama about liberty and the American Revolution? Who knew. Not me. And an ad for an iPhone Advent app?
So this thing is going to two hours? Everyone seems to agree that the show will go crazily on.
But then we get back from the commercials and the governors have just disappeared! They declined to come back!
Sean says both of them suddenly had scheduling conflicts.
The two sure had very late dinner parties to get to, considering it was by this time 10:42 p.m. in Georgia!
In this autumn of 2023, dark days in America, the medium is entirely the message. And what a weird medium Fox News is. I’m depressed just knowing I’ll have to go there again for a few seconds in March at the primaries to see what gives in Upside-Down World.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com