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American Idol? No Way

I like the concept of the Fox TV show, American Idol, and enjoyed previous seasons of competition. Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard were the two best people in that competition and they were the two finalists. In the first season, winner Kelly Clarkson was probably the best of her bunch.

It’s a shame that only Clay went on to do anything worth listening to afterwards.

Regardless, this season of American Idol is—as judge Randy Jackson put it—”a travesty.” America is bumping out the best participants and keeping the worst ones on. Crappy singers John Stevens and Jon Peter Lewis survived for weeks at a time while better competitors like Jennifer Hudson and Amy Adams got sent home early on.

The bad trends have continued. I had these people pegged for being in the final three: La Toya London, Jasmine Trias, and—my personal favorite—George Huff. Of those three, who are absolutely the best three, only Jasmine Trias remains. Most bizarrely, she was probably the third in my group of three.

So now they’re down to the final three, and it’s between the mediocre Diana DeGarmo, the annoying Macy-Gray-reincarnation Fantasia Barrino (though she does have great stage presence), and the moderately-good Jasmine Trias.

Somebody needs to offer La Toya London and George Huff a pair of record deals. It’s a real shame that neither of them will be winning this competition.

And it’s a real shame that this season of Idol has gotten so out-of-touch with reality that it’s no longer worth watching.

Idol producers: Change the voting system. Instead of voting for the people we like, we should have to vote against the ones we don’t. That would be a more intuitive way of determining who gets bumped off (vote for the one you want bumped) and would prevent the psychotic personality cults that form around the quirky contestants from staging middle school mass-voting parties.

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.