The Washington Post tracker of how Obama spends his time is strictly in the penny-ante league in comparison to the system described in a “classic Cold War satire”:http://books.google.com/books?id=FDrqtgQVpuQC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=%22the+secret+history+of+world+war+3%22&source=bl&ots=QgSX63lr9n&sig=ETJQbC5KT2UPMtP7VyQqwjW1J00&hl=en&ei=vNWSSl_WgbYHuMLQzgQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6#v=onepage&q=%22the%20secret%20history%20of%20world%20war%203%22&f=false by the recently deceased J.G. Ballard.
bq. During the next few weeks, thanks to the miracle of modern radio-telemetry, the nation’s TV screens became a scoreboard registering every detail of the President’s physical and mental functions. His brave, if tremulous heartbeat drew its trace along the lower edge of the screen, while above it newscasters expanded on his daily physical routines, on the 28 feet he had walked in the rose garden, the calory count of his modest lunches, the results of his latest brain-scan, read-outs of his kidney, liver and lung function. In addition, there was a daunting sequence of personality and IQ tests, all designed to assure the American public that the man at the helm of the free world was more than equal to the daunting tasks that faced him across the Oval Office desk. For all practical purposes, as I tried to explain to Susan, the President was scarcely more than a corpse wired for sound … To complete the identification of President, audience and TV screen – a consummation of which his physical advisers had dreamed for so long – the White House staff arranged for further layers of information to be transmitted. Soon a third of the nation’s TV screens was occupied by print-outs of heartbeat, blood pressure and EEG readings.
Nobody notices the beginning and end of World War III, because they are too caught up in television and newspaper analyses of the functioning of Ronald and Nancy’s bowels. Any resemblance to the current state of cable news (Ballard’s short story was written in 1988) is entirely coincidental.