"The Daily Show" Is the New New York Times

I am going to admit something REALLY embarrassing here. Ack, I can hardly type the words! Okay, here it goes:

I get 85% of my news from The Daily Show, 10% from my search engine's homepage, 4% from Perez Hilton, and 1% from local TV news. There, I admitted it!

I'm not kidding about this. A good example is this whole Egypt brouhaha. I saw a teaser about it on the 10 p.m. news last night when I was tuning in for the sole purpose of finding out when the next f-in' blizzard is going to come and ruin my day.

Hmm, Egypt...that's a new player in the ongoing international news loop, I thought. Then I saw something else about it on AOL or Google, or wherever. Huh.

Then I went on Facebook (c'mon, you knew it was only a matter of time) and saw that The Daily Show posted a link to a segment they did on the Egypt situation last night. One click, eight minutes of my time, and wham-o!, I was updated on the whole Egypt deal-io.

Okay, not really. Because I'm not an idiot: I realize that protests, political unrest, election controversies, coups, etc., cannot be summed up or adequately understood in an eight-minute news bite. These events are complicated and nuanced, and acquiring a full understanding of what's going on requires extensive reading about history, economics, race relations, politics, and more.

But who has the time and energy for that?

The worst part about all this is that at one time, a long time ago, I was actually passionate and informed about "International Relations" (as "World Politics" was confusingly called back then). I graduated from an excellent university with a minor in I.R. and wrote papers about U.S.-Soviet détente, Sunni-Shiite relations, and Middle East oil. I even applied to (and got rejected by) Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. I Marched on Washington! I was political! I cared!

Now, the most significant politics in my life are the ones I have to deal with while serving on the Board of my kids' preschool.