Geraldo Blows It As a War Correspondent

Today I report to my readers with glad tidings and a bit of delicious glee - Geraldo Rivera made a fool of himself once again!

That's right. America's sleaziest television reporter got himself thrown out of Iraq by his current employer, the spectacularly insufferable Fox News Channel (motto: "We distort; you're deceived") when he breached security measures by drawing on a patch of desert a map of just exactly where the unit in which he was embedded was due to advance, for all of the Fascist News Channel's viewers - and the fascists in both Washington and Baghdad - to see. Talk about drawing lines in the sand.

Geraldo almost single-handedly made a fiasco out of coalition troops' efforts to secure a portion of Iraq, and just when it seemed that the war could end sooner than thought only a few days earlier. He all but let Saddam Hussein (assuming he's still alive) know what was going to happen next, and he endangered the very safety of the soldiers he was travelling with. So out he goes! Good riddance.

Is Rivera through once and for well? Don't bet on it. Geraldo is the Madonna of broadcast journalism; he's awful at what he does, and he's too smug to realize what a schmuck he is, but he somehow manages to escape the kind of backlash that would destroy another person's career. In fact, he was on Fox's morning show after leaving the Middle East, boasting on how he made it out of Iraq with both his life and career intact. He's the man you love to hate, so Fox will certainly keep him on in some fashion; people you love to hate bring in big ratings.

Therefore, I don't feel particularly sorry for Fox as a result of all this drama-mama, and if Geraldo has ruined his career - a career undistingushed by his attempts to make himself part of the story - this time, I won't feel sorry for him either.

P.S. Regarding my Beatles convention report: It's coming, I promise.