• by Jack Feuer , August 18, 2009

Who says sitcoms are dead? The best show on TV is a sitcom. And it's gone viral, streaming like loose stool through the blogosphere. It's a show about stupid people. It's called "Town Hall."

Pistol-packing, placard-waving, spittle-spewing, red-faced screaming, sanity-challenged town halls. Beyond nuts, but so 21st century. Experiential. Community-linked. Mob-based.

And so effective.

Competing in the same time slot is what appears to be a pro-healthcare reform public access television program from the 20th century. Beyond bad. Driven by clumsy public relations and inane TV commercials.

And so ineffective.

Who could possibly be swayed by pudgy, middle-aged Harry and Louise, unimaginative pro-reform ads that stink like an NBC schedule, and miserable messaging that's less persuasive than a domestic automobile manufacturer's warranty? The public-access show even has an Old World dinosaur as a sponsor: Big Pharma, throwing in its drug-pushing lot with the White House, via a $150 million ad campaign.

Not surprisingly, the public's support for healthcare reform is dropping to its knees faster than a buxom booster in a C Street congressman's bedroom.

On "Town Hall," meanwhile, have you seen the looks on the faces of the senators who are the victims of these (so far) figurative beatings? Spit-take funny. French aristocrats dodging putrid fruit and rotting lettuce as their prison carts bounced over the cobblestones en route to the guillotine didn't look this terrified.

I can't help but recall the words of Galileo, similarly beset by imbeciles, who said: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

But Galileo never met an American. I mean, the man was a European. Probably had to wait for months to see a doctor.

Once again, as it did in 2008, but this time in reverse, politics schools marketing.

The Obama Administration has-maybe we should say had-the best, most-advanced communications machine on the planet. But they forgot to turn it on. Or the kids they won a campaign with just don't give a damn about what they probably see as an old person's problem.

Either way, Obamamarketing has been humbled by a lumpen mass of lunatics firing each other up via social networks. They are egged on by a handful of withered white pols aggregating their anger and a nativist cable operation that is nominally a TV network but acts like a rabid partisan blog.

This is what politics has taught you this year, children. Social media are cats, and you are mice. And you keep inviting them over for dinner.

Alas, it is impossible to overestimate marketers' obsession with smashing square pegs into round holes. But since it is in my self-interest for you to come to your senses before you're eaten, I pray you quickly absorb the latest lessons in propaganda strategy and tactics that our political leaders have so graciously provided.

Just sit back, enjoy the show, and make a beeline for the bathroom whenever Harry and Louise waddle onto the screen.