Who could have foreseen....

What's that old H.L. Mencken quote about no one having ever lost money or public office underestimating the taste on the great unwashed masses? Maybe someone needs to update it to include the phrase "or cable news ratings wars". Because in measures further proving God's death/extreme incapacitating inebriation, Fox News is on pace for it's best year ever. It seems lying to people, stoking racial fears, advocating various political deaths, playing up every paranoid conspiracy theory involving health care, and populating it's channel with hosts any decent society would have left on a sun baked mountainside to die of exposure, has become more of a ratings boon than telling everyone that Bush is doing a great job.

The network was already on pace for its best ratings year even before the health care debate sent viewership jumping during a traditionally slow month for news.
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Fox's strong year hasn't come without controversy. Some critics worry about overheated rhetoric -- Beck has called Obama a racist and joked about poisoning House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- and suggest Fox has helped lead, instead of just follow, the president's opponents.

Fox's viewership is up 11 percent over last year, according to Nielsen Media Research. CNN and MSNBC, which benefited from interest in the campaign last year, are down. O'Reilly, who already had cable news' most popular show, Beck and Sean Hannity lead the way.

The ratings expose as naive anyone who believed that the dawn of a Democratic government in Washington would hurt Fox.

Really, who thought that a black Democrat in the White House, Democrat control of Congress, and a liberal female Speaker from San Francisco was somehow not going to give Fox News enough material to cut loose and grab the imaginations of the Republican base? The only thing that's going to hurt Fox News is a giant, black, rectangle monolith appearing to tell us to advance as a society already/devolve into an shrieking ape society of hairy creatures that use animal bones as weapons. That, or the American news media at large trying to once again reclaim its stature as something other than a Cronkite/Murrow tandem grave spinning enterprise.

So congratulations Fox, I can only hope that all this success doesn't cause Glenn Beck's head to explode with delight or empower Sean Hannity to have a mental breakdown after he is ordered to imagine Nancy Pelosi engaging in some action so heinous that it shocks him into catatonic insanity. Yes....that would be...terrible.