'ROCK . . . Meet Hard Place!!

05/10/2012 -- Weekday Update #2 -- Greta Van Susteren of Fox has confirmed with NBC that SNL scrapped the parody aimed at President Obama for "spiking the football" over the first anniversary of the raid on the OBL compound in Abbottabad, PK, and instead ran a lampoon of a Fox morning show, Fox & Friends.

From Greta's' blog:

NBC is confirming reports that Saturday Night Live scrapped an opening sketch taking a poke at President Obama for politicizing Osama bin Laden’s death on the one-year anniversary.

Instead, the show opened with a skit mocking Fox New Channel’s morning show “Fox & Friends.” The show’s executive producer insists SNL has no hidden motive, saying the show just couldn't fit everything in and the President Obama impersonation simply didn’t make the cut.

Greta, we think you let 'em off the hook a little too easy! If anything was to be cut, it should have been the "Fox & Friends" bit, which was really lame. Where were your follow up questions?

05/08/2012 -- Weekday Update:  John Fund, writing at National Review Online (NRO), legitimately asks whether the long-running NBC comedy show -- Saturday Night Live (SNL) -- is not itself "fast becoming, well, a joke." (ht to reader Vince for the Fund piece).

John notes that even though SNL has politically canted a bit left throughout its 37 years on air -- and displayed staying power for its only sometimes storied run as a cultural institution of American comedy -- that there have nevertheless been some key moments in that history, of well-deserved fun poking at the more risible antics of several larboard-leaning political icons in our lives, even including a few Democratic presidential candidates.

Fund cites past skits aimed at Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, and even Barack Obama himself, back during the 2008 Democrat primaries. He notes that many of those skits were authored by veteran SNL writer, Jim Downey (himself a Democrat), whose latest lampoon was one poking a bit of fun at Barack Obama for a flurry of recent instances of "spiking the football" in and around the anniversary of the raid on the Osama Bin Laden lair in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

That skit, however, obviously proved just too much for the kill-joys at NBC, and it was cut from the show this past week, pulled in favor of one aiming its jibes at a Fox morning show, Fox & Friends.

Pretty pathetic!

The text of that eliminated skit, however, was leaked to The Daily Caller, once again exposing the censorious and enervating political bias of those in control at NBC.

05/06/2012 -- One might have thought the folks over at 30 ROCK had learned a valuable lesson with their recent exposure of a nasty bit of fabulism -- for having attempted to publicly paint George Zimmerman with a racist brush, by intentionally truncating key portions of a 911 call he made for a March 21st story about the explosive Treyvon Martin shooting case down in Sanford, Florida. That NBC story originally made it seem that Mr. Zimmerman's motivation leading up to the tragic fatal shooting of Martin, was blatantly racial (See the March 28th disclaimer at the end of their story.*)

Observers from several new media outlets, including both the Media Research Center and Fox, quickly teamed up to expose that brazen network attempt, as was posted about by Eric Wemple on his WaPo media blog. NBC eventually had to publicly retract their story, and apologize for the having broadcasted that obviously misleading story line in a few instances, including once on their flagship morning Today show. NBC was embarrassed and ultimately ended up conducting an internal investigation.  They said they fired an "unnamed" producer, who they identified as having overseen the improper editing the audio tape of the call. In fact, as of a few days ago, NBC reportedly had fired a total of three employees over the incident.

But has that very recent lesson somehow escaped NBC?  Consider the latest!

Now, the Daily Caller has posted a new piece, exposing the embarrassing level of political partisanship over at NBC, this time for someone having interfered with and scrapping, of all things, a Saturday Night Live skit.  It was one that humorously poked a bit of fun at President Obama in the wake of his recent habit of repeatedly "spiking the football" for personal political gain on the first anniversary of the operation last year to take out Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, PK.

That comedy skit that was slated for airing this weekend, but it was yanked at some point and instead replaced with one attacking the supposed "partisanship" of a Fox News Channel (FNC) show, "Fox & Friends." Now NBC has been exposed again, because the full text of the trashed skit itself was leaked to the Daily Caller, and has been posted by them on their site.

Can you just imagine the tone of the discussion at that internal NBC meeting . . . the one that must have been held at the network, and during which the issue was debated -- i.e., whether or not to scrap the skit? And, of course, to also discuss replacing it with a skit attacking another news network for their claimed political bias?

This is comedy gold, folks!

Just imagine those four or five or six sour-pussed NBC producer types, sitting huddled around a table in the network "situation" room (you know they must have one of those), airing the pros and cons of SNL going with a bit openly poking fun of Obama!

Do you suppose that at any point during that meeting that they debated the political "downside" of killing the skit, given the possibility, however remote, that that story might eventually leak? Here's betting that never really crossed their minds.

And, you've also really got to wonder exactly who had, and exercised the final "go, or no-go" authority . . . the ultimate call on scrapping it. You also have to wonder whether there was a consensus during the meeting (or maybe it was meetings) to "debate" the idea of tossing out the POTUS bit -- or whether their was a split of opinion?

Just the thought of any such meeting itself would inspire a good SNL skit -- one, of course, which we'll never see!

The interesting thing now will be if any other mainstream news organizations will seek to participate in the further exposure of the details of that obvious partisan political decision taken by the NBC "bigs." One of the worst things for any news-gathering organization is to themselves become the story. Recall if you will Dan Rather initiating the penultimate case, way back in the fall of 2004, with his "60 Minutes Wed." show, during which he dramatically airing "the Killian documents" about George W. Bush, ostensibly dating from back during the time of his service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Within hours, of course, the documents were identified as forgeries by a skeptical public on the internet -- remember Buckhead? -- as having been cobbled together by someone using a computer typeface invented years after the supposed dates posted on the "originals" that were aired by Rather on CBS. That CBS incident too involved obvious partisan political involvement by a news network during a Presidential election, one that cost Rather, and his "producer" Mary Mapes, their careers and reputations.

Obviously, there is no question that NBC, along with their nomenklatura of openly Obama-worshiping commentators over at MSNBC would have been a bit embarrassed in the aftermath of the airing of the original Obama skit. They are so heavily invested in Obama that poking even a bit of fun at him would have angered some of their viewing audience.

But in the end, the nakedly political killing of the skit could likely prove a much bigger embarrassment for them, and they will obviously be tempted now to take efforts to cover up the excruciating details . . . such as by risibly concocting a cover story, somehow claiming that an appropriate committee had carefully evaluated the skit, and determined that it just wasn't that funny!

Of course, I'm just guessing what their cover story might end up being, but the text of the now-published skit at the Daily Caller will speak for itself.

Well, here's my vote -- I say it's funny. It certainly is a whole lot funnier than the lame cheap shot replacement they aimed at Fox & Friends!

So, one might even be tempted to say at this point . . . 'ROCK, Meet Hard Place!!!

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* Here was that NBC disclaimer, printed with the March 21st written version, one week after the original misleading story about Zimmerman was posted:

"Editor’s note: A clarification was made to this story on March 28, 2012. An earlier version of the story truncated George Zimmerman’s quotes to a 911 operator in a way that may have changed the meaning."