Why Don't They Just Issue Swami Turbans at MSNBC?

Or shrink couches, or X-ray glasses?

It's my fault, I know, for watching the convention on a commercial cable channel, rather than on C-SPAN. But it strikes me that today's level of journalistic derangement exceeds anything I've experienced before.

These MSNBC analysts, you see, and these "strategists" whom no one in politics has ever heard of before except as talking heads on TV, and these veteran broadcasters who should know better: You see, they can read Hillary's mind And if they themselves can't personally read her mind, then what they want everyone they interview to do is to go ahead, take a shot, read Hillary's mind, and tell us what card she picked -- I mean, what she's really thinking.

It doesn't matter what she says tonight, or during the rest of the campaign. It doesn't matter what she does tonight, or from now until November. What matters is what's hidden in her head.

Pat Buchanan, you see, really and truly knows what's in Hillary's head, and it's this: Screw you, Barack, I hope you lose so I can win in 2012.

And what Buchanan -- whose continuing MSNBC meal ticket is perhaps the most craven extant example of corporate politainment's sick sick crush on mudwrestlers -- what Pat Buchanan is saying about the real true secret contents of Hillary's (and Bill's) mind has been echoed today by one chinstroker and windbag after another.

(Yes, I love Rachel, and Keith without Chris is a wonder, and some fine reporters are on the NBC payroll. But the Buchanan MO is hardly an outlier.)

So this is what political journalism has come to, two centuries after the First Amendment was written, and nearly three centuries after John Peter Zenger's trial: Pronouncements that cannot possibly be verified or disproved.

Mindreading.

Evidence-free, unaccountable, redfaced, shouted, demagogic cocksure mindreading.

It's really a shame Johnny Carson has gone to his eternal reward. GE could've gotten some serious synergy out of booking Karnak the Magnificent onto its news circus.

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