One of the many advantages of spending a few weeks abroad (see below) is that you don’t see any American news. The house we were staying in had French satellite TV and we saw plenty of news about America, courtesy BBC World and CNN International (no Al Jazeera English, sorry to say), but it was not always front and center. The fires in Greece beat the floods in the midwest, though both got their due, and on CNNI there was that palpable frustration you see on television when a tropical storm like Dean does not develop into a full-blown hurricane. “Tropical Depression” says it all.

International news networks, of course, cover the news from a more international perspective, meaning there is not one end of the telescope to see the world through but many. The US is still the proverbial fat man in the bathtub as far as economics go (I caught a very lively roundtable discussion on BBC about why hedge funds matter and how the mortgage crisis could roil the financial waters ’round the globe) but politically the sense that the Bush administration is a star in Nova is everywhere. It is hard not to look at each new resignation, each bellicose speech, as one of its death throes. News of its decline was deemed important, and speculation about what impact it would have on next year’s presidential election was also keen.

So it was depressing (if not tropically so) to get home Monday and tune into Anderson Cooper’s 10 pm news show (which is called 360 but tends to present a perspective that, degree wise, is more like 90) on American CNN and learn that Alberto Gonzalez had resigned — 22 minutes into the broadcast. Talk about burying the lead. Cooper wasn’t hosting that night; the lamentable Soledad O’Brien (who has done more for the smirk-as-default-expression than Deborah Norville in her hey day) was filling in for him, but given Cooper’s recent track record, he would have gone with the same lead story: Michael Vick’s guilty plea and apology.

Let me be the last to say that Michael Vick is a bad man, and I think that anyone who abuses and kills animals should meet a similar fate (surely someone has suggested that he literally be thrown to the dogs: Vick vs. the Pack! we could all bet on the outcome). But 22 minutes of coverage, at the top of the hour, with much of it given over to a cheesy uninformative “investigation” of dogfighting in America? Yes, I’m sure CNN is giving its viewers what they want but given the role of the attorney general in defending the president’s right to spy and torture, and the historical, Watergate like nature of his resignation, shouldn’t someone at the network have made the call that the story deserved better placement? How about a compromise: lead with Vick and his apology if you insist (don’t forget to find Jesus, Mike!) — but then turn to the little matter of the wheels coming off the Bushmobile, and come back later with your lame “in depth coverage” of dogfights?

What happened to the idea that the people deciding what was news had some moral responsibility to give the public something other than what they want? I know, I know: it’s a naive question when a network like CNN is owned by Time Warner and the people in charge are businessmen before they are journalists and their first responsibility is to their shareholders, and giving people plenty of scary black athletes and their killer dogs is as natural to them as giving your kid Cocoa Puffs for dinner. But there is another way to do things, folks. You only have to cross the pond to see it — and believe me, the BBC is only too happy to serve up dead Diana news (for this Friday, the tenth anniversary, the network has opted to rerun her entire funeral).

Now at least, thanks to Republican Senator Larry Craig we have a story we can all agree on. Kids like it because it features men having sex in public bathrooms (as my daughter said when she caught a glimpse of the news last night: “Ewww!”) while grownups can enjoy yet another fatal blow to the GOP mastodon. Thanks to Keith Olbermann for pointing out that Fox News, in covering the scandal, neglected to mention Craig’s party affiliation. The hypocritical, homophobic right wing senator has been a vehement opponent of gay marriage, gays in the military and sexual deviance of any sort. As the senator himself said at the beginning of his denial, “Thank you all for coming out today.”