Saturday Night Live's In-Kind Contributions to Obama

Three weeks into its new season, Saturday Night Live has had two sketches attacking McCain and two attacking Palin, and not a single sketch attacking Obama or Biden.

Obama's only shown up in one sketch, in a spoof of the first debate, in which McCain was portrayed as an unhinged nut and Obama as a serious politician. There were two token jokes thrown out about Obama -- one about Chicago corruption and another about playing the race card -- but the rest of the eight-minute sketch was poking at McCain. There were almost as many jokes about Hillary Clinton, who showed up at the end of the sketch, as about Obama.

I remember the good old days when SNL would attack all sides, and not pick sides. Sketches like the spoof of the three-way debate between Bush, Clinton, and Perot (with Dana Carvey playing both Bush and Perot) were the reason why people tuned in each week: to see funny parodies, not lame attack ads against one party's candidates.

These are not those days for SNL. It's too bad that just when they get a cast that is really putting out some good stuff, after several years in the wilderness, that they are undermining their own bread-and-butter: political spoofs.