Dick Cavett is still employed

... proving there's always a market for windbags who talk about the talk-stylings of other people who've actually, um... done stuff. Oh! And a shout out to fellow windbag Maureen Dowd is included free of charge:

The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla

Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn’t ailing. Three out of these five implements — answering machine, fax machine, printer, phone and electric can-opener — all dropped dead on me in the past few days.

Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will only get Sarah Palin.

[...]

And how much more of all that lies in our future if God points her to those open-a-crack doors she refers to? The ones she resolves to splinter and bulldoze her way through upon glimpsing the opportunities, revealed from on high.

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

(A cynic might wonder if Wasilla High School’s English and geography departments are draped in black.)

Read the rest if you like, but you don't need to. It just goes on in this vein for another 15 paragraphs. Dick has distilled for us here the pure, concentrated contempt that the NYT (and the media in general) has for the Other.

Dick? We "get" the motivations behind those who supported Barack Obama. We also "get" Sarah Palin's appeal. It's you that can't seem to understand us. But I wouldn't presume to blame your educators, because that would just be rude.