When something unexpected turns up, the trick in the punditry game is to figure out how quickly to fit the square peg into the round hole of your regular tropes – the bridge collapse in Minneapolis happened because of Bush’s illegal oil war, etc. Dr Michael Eric Dyson, “The Hip-Hop Intellectual”, offered a magnificent demonstration of this skill when he was interviewed by our pal Michelle Malkin on Fox last night. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that there was a “race card” angle on the Michael Vick dog thing, but Dr Dyson asserted that there are cultural factors we’re missing when it comes to considering dog fighting in the African-American community and threw in that many whites treat dogs better than they treat blacks. And then, as proof of this thesis, he offered:

Lassie was on the air for 20 years but Nat “King” Cole was canceled after six months.

Brilliant.

On the other hand, back in those days, Nat Cole had dozens of hit records, whereas the Singing Dogs only had one (“Jingle Bells”).