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The lead commentary piece by Louis Menand in this week's New Yorker (Nov. 2) is about the White House's recent little kerfluffle with Fox News. From it I learned that Fox has the oldest demographic in the cable news business (half of its viewers are over 63), and that the majority of viewers for the big-shrill Fox offerings such as Beck, Hannity, and Bill-O, are men.

Menand also gets into the importance of niche marketing in today's news business. Watching the programming that comes sandwiched in between the commercials for denture adhesive, Centrum Silver, and topical hemorrhoid remedies you get a pretty good idea of the exact nature of the niche Fox has carved out for itself -- the delusional one-quarter.

It also gives me a better idea of why I generally don't get along with people my own age, particularly men. No wonder. Fox News is where all those pot-bellied old farts go to get their daily anti-Obama erection. Of course, it's not the real Obama they hate; that one's a timid, vacillating, unprincipled and somewhat ignorant opportunist who so far has been almost completely ineffective in his discharge of his duties. Rather, the Obama they hate is the one who lives inside their heads, a tyrranical and corrupt Marxist dictator who plans to install universal government-run health care in YOUR community, then set up death panels to kill us senior citizens so the government doesn't have to pay for our care.

I think about these things, and I wonder how it feels to be such a freak.

I keep telling these guys on the rare occasions I talk to them that it's not Obama and the Democrats they need to worry about, it's people like me. Of course, they have no clue what that means, which is probably just as well.

Now, today on Fox they're probably (I'm speculating here 'cause I don't have TV), probably gloating about the two big victories last night, one where a state involved in the recent rebellion reverted to Republicanism, and the other where an overweight drunk driver beat a corrupt and widely unpopular Democratic hack. But the more important race was the Republican loss in NY-23 where teabagger-anointed Doug Hoffman had shouldered out the GOP establishment candidate in order to run and lose. What's important about it is that it's the wave of the future The teabaggers are planning primary challenges against more than a dozen establishment GOP regulars next year. So that already-weak party is splitting in two.

But even with that, they've got not much to fear from their old enemy the Democrats, who are splitting into fragments themselves. Between the Blue Dogs and so-called moderates is a motley collection of party hacks, corporate whores, and slick operators like Emmanuel and Steny Hoyer, led by an ineffectual and inexperienced amateur who at this point seems paralyzed with fright.

There's a new party coming. It's gathering like the lava dome that formed in the St. Helen's crater 30 years ago. It's coming just like the Republican Party showed up on cue, right before the Civil War. And it's going to be fueled by the continued criminal behavior in the financial sector, who committed the frauds currently causing millions to be out of work and hundreds of thousands to lose their homes. Also it will be in response to the endless war which lurches on without purpose, demanded of us by the war state. And people are going to rise up and say, "No more of this." Look to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to produce the seed of the new party. That's the party the Fox newsies need to worry about.