C-SPAN: Home of the Thinking Man’s Foxes

When you don’t have money for a big exciting TV package, you have to settle for what you can get in Comcast basic limited cable. That’s what I do, anyway.

As my career as a journalist dwindles, and as my career as a musician never takes off, I am stuck making do with many things. Hence, my brain gets addled by watching awful network TV, which occasionally redeems itself with sports programming or the Thursday night NBC comedy lineup. Or the late-night re-runs of “South Park” on WGN. PBS also offers decent documentary stuff and “Antiques Roadshow” and the occasional British police procedural, usually very well-made, often putting to shame its American counterparts. (Honest, I only watch the execrable David Caruso on “CSI Miami” when I am absolutely hard-up for something to watch. Even then, I’m just waiting for Emily Procter to enter the screen.)

But I also feel very blessed that I can get C-SPAN, which I have come to watch pretty religiously. I mean, why watch a bad sitcom when you can see our actual legislative representatives and national leaders doing hilarious things in real time? And there’s hardly ever a re-run!

You can see the Brits and Canadians trying to manage a country too. Plus, C-SPAN delivers good interviews, mobile programming from around the country and the proceedings of political confabs of every stripe, not to mention the actual workings of the U.S. Congress, votes and all.

So there is much to learn watching C-SPAN, and I’d venture to say that I am better informed via my TV regimen than the average person with a fabulous cable package, mainly because a person with many choices would never opt for bland-looking, almost sepia-toned C-SPAN.

But here’s the dirty secret about C-SPAN: It has foxy ladies doing interviews and talking-head stuff on its “Washington Journal” early morning call-in show.

C-SPAN may be the last place in the world you’d expect to see hotties, but there they are: sexy chicks for news junkies.

Take Libby Casey. A correspondent for Alaska Public Radio, Casey moonlights with C-SPAN, and she’s a smoking hot babe in the Sarah Palin tradition. (Must be something about the air in Alaska.) I’m guessing Casey wears those Tina Fey/Palin glasses to distract us from the fact that she’s beautiful. But the fact is, that by wearing the glasses, we are compelled to look

beyond them, and then imagine what it would be like to be behind closed doors with her when she seductively removes them (the glasses, I mean). Casey is very prim and precise and calm and cheerful in her anchor duties, but it’s hard to avoid imagining the potential for smoldering sexuality that must lie within.

Then there’s Greta Wodele Brawner. She’s been on C-SPAN for about five years, but she still looks like she’s fresh out of college. If Libby Casey is the C-SPAN sexbomb, then Greta is their girl-next-door. She’s pretty and petite--really petite--and she looks great in pastels.

She also made the cover of the Jan. 2010 Washington Life magazine, looking slinky and sparkly and sophisticated. Greta has well swallowed the C-SPAN Kool-Aid: She is poised and almost hypnotically controlled on-set, quietly eliciting answers from guests and sweetly saluting phone-callers nationwide. Greta’s the girl you wanted to marry. And, in all likelihood, didn’t.

Which brings us to the grand dame of C-SPAN, veteran reporter/interviewer and C-SPAN executive Susan Swain. Swain’s an interesting case. She’s in her mid-50s. She’s a Catholic school girl all grown up who has excelled as a journalist and C-SPAN boss, yet she also performs with grace and control. She’ll be a little more aggressive in her questioning of guests as need be, but obviously that’s because Susan has been around and can sling it with the big boys. Nevertheless, she has that characteristic C-SPAN understatedness that bespeaks blessed civility, where a citizen can believe that productive discourse still really exists.

Of course, we can’t overlook that Susan is a pretty cute lady. Categorizing her as a cougar would be going a bit far, I guess, but Susan apparently likes Shakespeare, and I’m sure there are plenty of guys--young or old--who’d love to do a balcony scene with her.

So next time you zap the remote control past C-SPAN, on your way to HBO or ESPN 2 or TV Land or the Food Network or the thousands of other cable options you’ve got--just remember that there are hidden treasures of brains and beauty you might be missing.

Viva the C-SPAN babes! Long may they...uh...interview.