Cant — there’s a great old word.

Although I’m a news junky, I go through periods of absolute, total overload, when I’ve simply had enough, especially of the constant breathlessness of news people and the mindless repetition of political comment.

I’m in one of those periods right now. (I’m not blogging very much.) I still check in with my favorites from time to time, but I’m skimming rather than reading.

Have noticed, you don’t have to read much to get what’s going on?

I was thinking about this yesterday. I was reading David Brooks in the New York Times who, by the way, usually makes an attempt to say something thoughtful. In his column “Getting Obama Right” — I liked his description of the situation — he was talking about “information cocoons,” those media/comment locations where true believers, right or left, can go and live full time in their own reality.

Now, I’m as normal as anyone else; I really enjoy writers who are smart enough to agree with me.

But when skimming, I’ve developed a practice that saves time. It’s sort of a language filter I call rant-dar. Most of the time it takes only a few phrases to notice that all Christians are stupid or Obama is a fascist and then you know you’re in for more ya-da, ya-da, ya-da.

So I scan a sentence or two and when I spot the mindless party line, either right or left, I just quit reading.

It works pretty well. Sometimes it even helps you find some thought — though not always because, in the scramble to fill hours of airtime and the Internet palaver, there’s not a ton of fresh thought out there. It’s pretty much the same mindless cant passed around like overripe fruit.

Cant. Now there’s a great old word. I checked the dictionary. It says: insincere, especially conventional expressions of enthusiasm for high ideals, goodness or piety.

Wow, that captures a lot our political and media landscape.