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Saturday, April 14, 2007

How Bill Clinton helped ruin childhood innocence

This morning reminded me once again why Bill Clinton was one of the worst Presidents in American history: because he single-handedly destroyed Saturday morning cartoons.

It was back around the mid-1990s that he did the deed. Clinton decided that children's television programming wasn't "educational" enough: kids were enjoying Scooby-Doo and Papa Smurf way too much for their own good. So Clinton handed down a decree through the FCC: a high percentage of children's programming had to be "educational" in nature. Which was just the Clintons' way of saying that they were going to expose children to more of their screwball propaganda. So we got a helluva lot less of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show and a lot more @&$%-ing crap like Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Lord how I hated that show. Whoever's responsible for putting it on the air should have been dragged out into the street and shot. And there was a lot of other #&$@ that wound up on the air because of Clinton too.

Do you understand what I'm saying here? That Saturday morning, which for so many decades was understood to be "the children's time" of the week, and something even considered sacred, was destroyed by Bill Clinton because he wanted to put his own greasy stamp on that and everything else. This is what he wanted his "legacy" to include. He didn't give a damn about the children. Clinton only thought of himself, just as he did with everything else. He destroyed Saturday morning for children.

He destroyed it for everyone else too. I'll never forget the first time I fully understood what he had done. It was one morning in September 1997 and "Weird" Ed and I were waiting for the premiere episode of The Weird Al Show on the local CBS affiliate. Instead we got this s*** called Wheel of Fortune 2000. I called up the CBS station and they said that because of Clinton's mandate for more children's "educational" programming, that they had to include Wheel of Fortune 2000 and because they had their local morning news show, there wasn't time to put The Weird Al Show into their Saturday morning schedule.

All it took was one man to destroy something pure, innocent, wonderful and fun. And what's more, Saturday morning television has never recovered. What Clinton did, he did to the next few generations of young Americans, and quite possibly it'll be more than that. I don't see Saturday morning programming returning to the way it once was anytime soon.

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