This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she’s laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.

(Yes, I made this. Go here for more stuff like it.)

Before leaving my apartment this morning to confront the citywide shutdown of all public transportation, I turned on my TV to see if there was any useful info on NY1, New York’s lovably ramshackle 24/7 news channel. I tuned in just in time to watch the anchor read a handful of viewer e-mails off of a laptop. As the anchor read each viewer comment, the director switched cameras to show a shot of the laptop screen, on which the comments were displayed in Microsoft Word. And here’s the excellent part: The copy of Word was configured to underline grammatical and spelling errors. Of the six or seven comments that were shown on the air, Word flagged problems in at least three. Oh, NY1, you are so low-rent, and it’s charming.

I’ve been watching MSNBC for the last two hours, and it’s kind of disturbing to see all the old Nixon thugs come out of the woodwork. With numbing predictability, Pat Buchanan has been ranting like the odious brat he is, insisting over and over again that Deep Throat was a traitor and possibly a criminal. And now Chris Matthews is talking to that upstanding citizen Chuck Colson. I’m sure that if Ehrlichman and Haldeman were still alive, all the networks would be giving them the elder-statesman treatment—instead of the public whipping that they, and all the others, deserve. This is why I almost never watch TV news.

This seems like a perfect moment to post one of the best publication covers in my personal collection. I acquired the excellent artifact at left in 1997, during a year I spent living and working in D.C. One day in the late spring or early summer, I was sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle during my lunch hour when a homeless guy walked over to me with the complete Washington Post from August 9, 1974—the day after Nixon stepped down. This guy didn’t just have the front page or the front section from that historic day—he had the whole paper. He offered to sell it to me for $20. I offered him $10, and we had a deal.

Oh, jeez, I’ve still got MSNBC on, and I’m starting to get a little terrified. At the moment, the panel consists of Al Haig, Gordon Liddy, Joe Scarborough, Monica Crowley, and Pat Buchanan. Of course all these people are going to criticize Felt for what he did. Why not elicit the opinions of some prominent Nixon antagonists from the Watergate era—the Republicans and Democrats and independents who actually worked hard to ensure that a reckless, criminal administration was held accountable for its crimes? Oh, wait, I know the answer: Because it’s TV news.

I’m a little hesitant to post this, because I have no desire to add to the Dan Rather pile-on, even though I’m basically neutral about the guy. Despite the obvious screw-ups involved in the whole National Guard imbroglio, I think Rather has taken way more lumps than he’s deserved in recent months, especially when you consider that (a) the overall thrust of the National Guard report was, without a doubt, true, and (b) dozens of reporters made worse mistakes during the Lewinsky saga without paying a price—and many of them even saw substantial career benefits from their willingness to trot out unsubstantiated information that later proved to be false.

In any event, Rather can’t be blamed at all for the incident shown in this brief, grainy video, which is interesting mainly because it’s fun to watch highly controlled media environments fall apart. The first half of the video is the opening seconds of The CBS Evening News on January 22, 1991, when three AIDS activists infiltrated the CBS studios and interrupted the broadcast with chants. The protesters didn’t make it on camera, but a production assistant or producer is thrust into the frame as he tries to push them back. The second half of the video is Rather’s apology after the hasty commercial break.

I pulled this off of one of my old Media Shower tapes.

The thought of being interviewed on live TV scares me, because I’d probably end up doing something like this:

As far as I know, it was not a prank. But prank or not, it’s compelling viewing. The slow, dull buildup only adds to the soul-crushing horror at the end.