Obama a no show, but Tina "Palin" Fey appears on SNL; Anderson Cooper loves tight black shirts and more

Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin's ultimate doppelganger popped up on Saturday Night Live Saturday and she was even better than I could have ever imagined.

Tina Fey, I take back anything bad I've ever said about you and I salute you. Good show, madame. Good show.

I couldn’t have been more pleased.

So many of us who saw this were right. Fey and Sarah Palin could be long lost siblings. With the stupid bouffant hair and the right pair of glasses, she was the epitome of Palin perfection, even her northern Midwestern accent was on point and Chicago Tribune writer Maureen Ryan concurred.

As the program came on, there was Fey in a bright red blazer. She was the spitting image of Palin (or wait, is Palin the spitting image of Fey?). Even Fey's flat Palin-esque accent was perfect; Fey had obviously closely studied the interviews that Palin gave to ABC on Thursday and Friday ...

As (Amy Poehler as Clinton) spoke, Fey-as-Palin struck sexy poses and pretended to fire a shotgun. "What an amazing time we live in," she said. "To think that just two years ago, I was a small town mayor of Alaska's crystal meth capitol."

I loved the route SNL took with it, contrasting Palin’s relative newness, inexperience and fraudulent yet “Manchurian Candidate” feeling with a scorned Hillary Clinton who viewed as an undeserving profiteer of her tough loss in the Democratic Primaries. (A pregnant Amy Poheler looked way more like Clinton than usual because of her puffy face and additional poundage.)

My favorite part was when they compared their battles with sexism, where Hillary had to deal with a lot of negativity and vilifying because of who she was and what she represented (I believe the terms “bitch” and “grating” were thrown around a lot), while Palin is being objectified for her sexuality and good looks, with the bulk of her criticism coming from tangible, suspect issues demonstrating she was not vetted by the McCain campaign.

As for Barack Obama’s scheduled appearance, it was canceled at the last minute due to the campaign’s sensitivity over the Galveston/Houston area being battered by Hurricane Ike. And was that a freaky hurricane to watch? I mostly watched CNN’s coverage reporters getting beat up by wind, rain and the ocean and, oddly, of Anderson Cooper removing, then putting back on then removing then putting back on his red CNN parka.

Per usual, Andy was wearing a fitted-to-obscenely-tight black shirt.

And it was surreal with Houston being a ghost town with the exception of crazy folk who showed up in a chicken costume or pretending to swim behind Anderson as he attempted to report the news.

The way CNN and Cooper himself handle his causal, metrosexual, withholding, but nervous newsman style, I have to say, Anderson seems to be the only anchor on TV who actually displays sex appeal overtly on television. (Rick Sanchez tries, but he’s the Rob Riggle of CNN.) This critique doesn’t mean Cooper’s the only sexy person. Gosh, no. As readers may have noticed, I dubbed Sir TJ Holmes of CNN Weekend the sexiest teleprompter reader, but TJ never wears a muscle shirt when he’s covering some flood or tornado in northern Arkansas.

Although I wouldn’t mind that. Not at all.

Seeing Anderson Cooper in a black muscle shirt is almost the equivalent of a hot news woman baring cleavage or wearing tighter, more alluring outfits while reporting, like the women who do the news on Univision and Telemundo. The Spanish speaking airwaves are filled with voluptuous figures with huge chi-chis, sometimes baring cleavage and oozing sex appeal. FOX News does a lesser, slightly more buttoned up version of this, but CNN and MSNBC are all complicit in hiring young hot people to deliver the news (as chronicled in one of my favorite “The Daily Show” sketches of 2008, “NILF: News I’d Like to Fuck.”)

If those shirts get any tighter during natural disasters I fear CNN will start playing Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane" when AC360 comes on.

The weirdness was further contrasted when Dan Rather was brought on via satellite for an interview about storm coverage (since Rather pioneered live hurricane reporting). Rather, of whom I’ve never seen as “sexy,” still has that perfect anchor man voice and devil-may-care panache. Despite being the crappiest of the three major network anchors in the 80s and 90s (he was always coming in third to Peter Jennings and the iconic Tom Brokaw), I love Rather, largely because of his “Ratherisms,” notoriety for spitting out some crazy Texas turn of phrase and his occasional loss of composure, often like he was breaking the “fourth wall” of reporting by going into something bizarre, like ending his newscasts with the word “courage” or saying “somewhere in the Bible it says … keep hope alive” when the Coast Guard was out trying to find John F. Kennedy Jr. after he flew off and got himself killed, further fueling my speculation that his uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, is the highlander.

Well … it’s either him or West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, newsman Mike Wallace, news satirist and columnist Andy Rooney or talk show host Larry King.

I’m still betting it’s either Byrd or Wallace.

There can only be one!