American Idle

This year’s big loser on American Idol was Lisa de Moraes, the condescendingly snobbish Washington Post TV columnist. She calls Carrie Underwood “the hoedown queen” and ridicules her for a “total lack of understanding of the lyrics of almost any song.” To justify the latter remark, Ms. de Moraes had previously taken Carrie to task for failing to adequately explain these perfectly unambiguous lyrics of McArthur Park: “Someone left the cake out in the rain I don't think that I can take it 'Cause it took so long to bake it. And I'll never have that recipe again.”

In today’s column, Ms. de Moraes is appalled that “more than 500 million votes were cast Tuesday night for Underwood and Bice. I think that’ more votes than the president got.” Well, 500 million would be nearly ten times as many votes as the president got (59.7 million) and nearly twice large at the entire U.S. population (272 million). As was clearly explained, the 500 million figure referred to the total votes cast for the whole season.

Since Ms. Moraes lacks even the grade-school knowledge to realize it is impossible to collect half a billion U.S. votes, I wonder how well she could explain, say, the lyrics of McArthur Park.