Was This Service Forum Really Worth Having To Go Outside?
Intern Juli has compiled her notes and will now describe the atmosphere at Columbia University during last night's Service Nation Forum with Barack Obama and Walnuts. If you watched the thing, you'll understand how comical it is that so many people were duped into watching it outside. Here is Juli's preview from yesterday.
Some 5,000 Columbia students sat on the steps of an administration building to watch the Servicing 9/11 thing on their precious flatscreen teevee. Everyone whined all day Thursday about how the concrete steps were so uncomfortable that it was like sitting on concrete, and yet they continued to sit out there despite this thing being broadcast on smaller teevees, indoors, all over campus. So there they sat, with their Philip Roth or whatever, and complained.
Of course the teevee was broken anyway, and the sound kept cutting in and out, and then the picture was black and white, which was racist, especially on 9/11. Your Wonkette Intern only knows this because of GChat; complications with her computer battery forced her to sit inside the press room with some other web-bloggers who were also duped into covering this.
It turned out that one of the "viewer questions" that John McCain had to answer, that one from "Gisele" in Brooklyn, it turned out that "Gisele" was sitting in the press room! This question was a trap and McCain walked right into it, believing "Gisele" was some first-generation American mother of seven from Bed-Stuy or whatever. This was literally the only interesting thing that happened in the press room.
But anyway, back by the dumb teevee, there was much commotion about this Rick Stengel guy, and whether his jaundiced hide was so gruesome and yellow because of the broken teevee or not. And there was clapping and booing at the exact moments you would think that these kids would put down their iPhones for three seconds in order to clap and boo.