Hey, I like Joanne Jacobs, I really do. Her writing is sharp and funny and shamelessly self-promotional — the very spices that flavor the finest blog-omelets. So, if you’ve a few moments to kill, do as Instapundit suggests and go read JJ’s take on why Geraldo is a liar.

But don’t believe it, not even for a second. (Okay, believe it if you must. But then strike it from your head immediately).

Why? Well, because as those of you who regularly read this blog already know, Geraldo is eminently praiseworthy, a man among hairless boys, a thick, drabkhakied, whiskey-in-your-wounds sort of digicam soldier — a leathery onsighter who faces hostile gunfire with steely-eyed resolve and a ‘stache destined for the chisel and the stone (even if — inadvertantly — he happens to “drift” a few hundred miles away from the scene on which he’s supposedly reporting).

Jacobs describes Geraldo as “Chatty Cathy in a bush hat” — a yummy phrase, certainly, but hardly a nutritious one. As I’ve written before, there’s something quite comforting about Cap’n Geraldo’s breathless and ham-fisted dispatches from right there amid the jags-‘n’-crags of a battle-ravaged clearing, flanked as he is, ubiquitously, by spent munitions shells and pulverized rock, by twisted metal and shoeless Arab carcasses, by an adoringly shaky camera (and a handful of bemused Afghan “bodyguards” — any one of whom would trade our dustcoated Gerry for a can of oil-packed tuna and some peanut butter crackers, were the Fox money suddenly to dry up). He’s an easy mark, sure: that’s the risk he runs for having the balls hefty enough to wear his lipbrush so thick and insistent. But his is the brazen semiotic of an unabashed testostero-warrior — scourge of the Oprahfied man! — and it strikes a chord; that the image was dreamt up by a well-funded marketing posse, and cultivated by Abercrombie pre-worns and Arab-gingham scarfery, is beside the point…

‘Cause Geraldo is our glorious war proxy, a fat FoxNews meatloaf on a buffet table strewn with Reuters finger foods, and mild CNN cheeses impaled on ornate toothpicks. For couch warriors like me (and there are millions of us, hooked on war coverage, snacking daily on salty chips and Rummy punch), Geraldo — his voice determined and weary, his candid drama-ntary larded with jockish bluster –is responsible for putting the “Tora” in Tora Bora (even as he on occasion puts the “shit” in horeshit). So please. Let us come to praise Geraldo. Not — Not! — to bury him…

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