A Foolish Consistency

Frank Rich takes on Time Magazine’s choice of “You–yes, you” as 2006 Person of the Year in his Op-Ed column in today’s New York Times. After skewering Time for its “sad . . editorial pratfall” he decides that “Time made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons . . . As our country seeks deeper into a quagmire — and even a conclusive Election Day repudiation of the war proves powerless to stop it — we the people . . . will seek out any escape hatch we can find.” For many that escape hatch is the ready distractions of YouTube (”[a]s of Friday morning, “Britney Spears Nude on Beach” had been viewed 1,041,776 times . . . The count for YouTube video clips tagged with “Iraq” was 22,783″) and the “sideshow villains who distracted us from main news events in the Middle East: James Frey, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, and Judith Regan.” Check it out.