In the time-honored tradition of bloggers criticizing the conventional media: I turned on CNN yesterday for pre-convention coverage - first time I watched cable news in a few months - to see Lou Dobbs ask a political journalist "How important is this night of the convention for John Kerry?" If you're curious, the answer was "very important." Dobbs then asked a different journalist how important last night was.

Politics is a lot like hockey it seems:

Hockey commentary is always moronic, but it reaches a special intensity of moronitude at playoff time. You know what I'm talking about: the "this game is critical" analysis, sometimes phrased as a question ("Pat, how critical is it to win this game?"). Fellas, can I let you in on a secret? In a seven-game series, every game is critical. Lose that first game, and you're down 0-1: you're behind the eight-ball right off the top. Then there's the critical second game: win it, and the series is all tied up, the momentum is all yours; lose, and you're facing a 2-0 deficit, and as we know, only 35 teams in 962 series have come back from 2-0 to win (gosh: you mean teams that lose games usually lose series?).

But now we come to the critical -- I mean critical -- third game. Maybe the teams are tied going in: so whoever wins gets the all-important edge. Or one team's up 2-0: they win, and they're up 3-0, and you might as well just go home; they lose, and suddenly they're vulnerable, the momentum has shifted etc. Oh, but that's just the prelude to the critical fourth game: the clincher, or maybe the last stand, or possibly the one that ties it all up, or sometimes the one that breaks a tight series wide open.

Of course, the fifth game, now the fifth game's critical...

Thats Andrew Coyne, who needs to fix his permalinks so I can link directly to his posts without having to reproduce them. Admittedly the analogy is imperfect - the last night of the convention is, of course, far more important than the others - but any day when the Democrats have the direct focus of the media is pretty damn important.