If President Bush Jumped Out of an Airplane, Would You Too?
Thank God for Fox News Alerts. Otherwise, we might not have known that yesterday at approximately 1: 20PM EST, Brit Hume landed safely from his tandem parachute jump celebrating George H.W. Bush's 80th birthday. We had been worried. There's all this peer pressure for the older news guys to jump out of airplanes ("Hey, Novak did it!"), and some of them just aren't ready.
Where will this Mountain Dew-ization of the media take us? Wonkette's extreme sports correspondent has a plan:
If Fox News can get Brit Hume to jump out of an airplane, surely Team Hardball can fire Chris Matthews out of a canon. Other possibilities? "the Keith Olberman rip tide challenge," "fun with alligators and Dan Abrams," "Tom Brokaw"s 30 Rock bungee jump," "barrelling over Niagara with Brian Williams," "shooting the apple off of Joe Scarborough's head," and "clearing the snake river canyon with an Evil Knievel tandem rocket built for Lester Holt and Chris Matthews."
Well, anything would be more interesting than what's actually on MSNBC now.
UPDATE: Why bother with giving your tipsters clever names and promises of future faux-lesbian soft-core porn photos when they'll just turn around and give a cleaned-up version of their witticism to the guy in the next office over in exchange for nothing at all? From today's Hardball Briefing:
Back to Shuster. He notes that former President Bush and others jumped out of an airplane over the weekend and, with both feet planted firmly on the ground but tongue in cheek, sends along this e-mail: "Given that another unnamed cable network is getting their unnamed political anchors to jump out of airplanes in search of a story... we at MSNBC have decided that this is a terrific development in the world of broadcast journalism. So, this week, our own prime time lineup will include: "Chris Matthews, the Human Cannonball" "Bungee Jumping with Tom Brokaw," "Tim Russert's Fun with Alligators". . .
You get the idea. At least "shooting the apple off of Joe Scarborough's head" made onto both fantasy schedules, 'cuz we'd totally watch that.