Katie Couric: Exit, Stage "Left"

Andrea Peyser, a scathing old-school social critic at the New York Post, understands why Katie Couric sucked wind at the helm of CBS's flagship newscast:

The truth is that TV's Great Hope proved to be a highly abrasive, polarizing personality. She is a none-too-bright, East Coast lefty whose extreme political biases didn't hurt her much as a morning gal. But at night, she was unmasked as a dame who can't fathom that at least half the country isn't buying what the political dingbat has to sell.

...Even the usually fawning Times described Katie as "haughty" and shielded by an entourage. This is true. I met Katie twice while on stories. Twice, she treated those who were not famous or in her posse -- such as me -- like insects, waving away unappetizing folks, while sucking up to celebs.

And of course - like all limousine liberals - rather than look inwards at herself for an explanation, Katie is lashing out at everyone around her, blaming sexism, Dan Rather, and poor lead-ins for her disastrous reign at CBS. Because, of course, she can never, ever, be wrong....she's a liberal, after all.

So she was absolutely correct when she said Americans were seething with anti-Muslim hatred. She was completely fair in calling non-residents of New York "the great unwashed". It was funny when she went to Princeton to speak at "Class Day" and mocked Sarah Palin and the Republican party. And, of course, there is nothing wrong in accepting the Helen Thomas Award for Excellence in Journalism from the great anti-Semite and Israel-denier herself, and there's nothing like cracking a big grin when Thomas intones, to a standing ovation, that the best thing you ever did was spring a booby-trap on Sarah Palin and deny her the election.

No, Katie, that's all OK. None of this has anything to do with why people don't like you. It's because you're a woman, or Republicans are mean, or something like that...

So in all fairness, let's let a liberal feminist tell the world the truth about Katie Couric. Folks, I give you Camile Paglia:

...let me take this opportunity to say that of all the innumerable print and broadcast journalists who have interviewed me in the U.S. and abroad since I arrived on the scene nearly 20 years ago, Katie Couric was definitively the stupidest. As a guest on NBC’s ‘Today’ show during my 1992 book tour, I was astounded by Couric’s small, humorless, agenda-ridden mind, still registered in that pinched, tinny monotone that makes me rush across the room to change stations whenever her banal mini-editorials blare out at 5 p.m. on the CBS radio network . And of course I would never spoil my dinner by tuning into Couric’s TV evening news show. That sallow, wizened, drum-tight, cosmetic mummification look is not an appetite enhancer outside of Manhattan or L.A. There’s many a moose in Alaska with greater charm and pizazz....

Get what the problem is yet, Katie?