In the second hour, Lionel will be joined in-studio by Naomi Boak, the Emmy Award-winning producer of the PBS series The Forgetting. The series, based in large part on David Shenk’s best-selling book, is perhaps the most complete and probing look at Alzheimer’s disease we have yet to come across. The show looks at the unsettling epidemic from all angles – biological, emotional, and, most profoundly, familial. What emerges is an intense portrait of living with a disease that is surely one of the most terrifying and spiritually destructive maladies that can be visited upon a loved one.

We are perhaps happiest to welcome Naomi Boak because she is a confirmed and card-carrying F.O.L. (friend of Lionel). Dermott is currently awaiting the approval of his pending F.O.L. status and, assuming it goes through, hopes to have his card soon.

Yesterday, you joined me for an examination of John McCain’s decided lack of charm and grace. While certainly different from President Bush’s, Mr. McCain is currently perfecting his own brand of mumbling, stumbling and bumbling his way through “answers” which more often than not fail to…answer. We know all that.

Now, as I understand it, bloggers are supposed to “break” news and/or create an “online sensation” by being the first to cover a particular angle or pounce upon a gaffe while the rest of the world is still slumbering in its collective Spider-Man PJs. Today I shall attempt, like my more experienced blogger brethren, to weave an online hub-hub from whole cloth.

Before I dive in to the world of online journalism, you should know that I am wearing a fedora with a little “Press” card tucked in to the band…and little else.

In my first outing as a cutting-edge citizen journalist, I would like to present you with a video clip  which I believe contains John McCain’s first “Howard Dean” moment. That’s right, evra-buddeh: note the undeniably strange twirl McCain executes with his left hand while breathing heavily and half-giggling in an entirely disquieting manner.

Perhaps I’m reaching here. Perhaps this represents that most treasured of journalist efforts, the trumped-up “non-story”? So be it (I am in no way compensated for my integrity, after all). All I know is that as I watched this awkward speech, I was made so palpably uncomfortable by McCain’s feigned, childlike exuberance and his obvious politically-motivated tumescence for “salt of the the Earth” biker-types that I just had to show someone, if only to feel that I am not alone. Do you feel the same way I feel when you watch this? Like you’re watching a desperate man courting a bunch of yahoos who cheer maniacally whenever they hear the word “America”?

(Editor’s Note: Dermott McCallscreener does not think that people who enjoy riding motorcycles should all be classified as “a bunch of yahoos”. However, anyone who responds favorably to the Grade-D platitudes that McCain dribbled out in the speech can only be described as a “yahoo”. Thank you).

The profoundly disturbing thing about it all is that as sad as this McCain appearance was, as fawning and pandering and just plain silly as his gesticulations and his rhetoric were…this crap works.

I’ll say it again: this crap works.

We’re not sitting nearly as pretty as we think we are, boys and girls.

I wanted to hate this, but…damn it all to hell, she did a bang-up job. Good comedic timing, confident, controlled delivery…she really nailed it, in my opinion.

Now, as to the question of whether this is a good thing for the Obama campaign to be tacitly associated with, well…let’s talk about that today, shall we?

And as for the larger notion that perhaps the direct involvement of heretofore vapid celebrities in the American presidential campaign represents the advanced stages of a “Fall of Rome” scenario playing out in our fair land, well…sure. You know I’m always up for a good Apocalypse theory.

See you all in hell.

Just kidding.

Or am I?

No, I am.

Or…

Love,

Dermott McCallscreener