Received a text from the Sib late Thursday morning.

Jesse Jackson is an idiot.

Yeah, that seemed to be true. A page 4 story in the Post had alerted me over my morning coffee to what would be the “news” of the day–bigger than the floods (which led the cable news to loop through the same images of water in the streets and not too much in commentary, I mean it was too much water, what’s to say?) but a little smaller than Imus (cable-fest big contrast with the old white guy versus young black women with some of the same commentators).

So, we got someone making a disparaging comment about a rival/peer. Makes you kind of hate recordings, because if Jesse had made the comment without the salacious evidence, there would be NO STORY. As it was, it was a non-story that spun and spun and spun until it finally sputtered all over itself.

Colby King from the WaPo got it right this morning when he wrote

The reverend brother was simply fat-mouthing….Jesse Jackson was sitting on the TV set next to a brother talking trash, selling wolf tickets, being verbally aggressive when he knew full well that he wasn’t about to do anything but dis Obama (presumably) behind his back.

Hey, that’s not news. It’s what people do. It’s me talking about my boss doing something dumb. Or someone who calls me boss (or parent) talking trash about me. So what. It portends nothing of importance. And that he got “caught” just causes group pain as we relive and rehash, rewind and recoil the non-story.

This fake drama that doesn’t improve big city education, provide appropriate medical care for soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, or help us remember the discussion we almost had after Katrina.

Yeah, Jesse is an idiot, for feeding the idiot media for our idiot consumption.