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ThatDamnedPanda -> RE: Limbaugh's latest attacker: RNC's Steele (3/4/2009 11:26:12 AM)
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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
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ORIGINAL: ThatDamnedPanda
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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
But unless he has changed in the last few years, his biggest shtick is to skewer the liberal branch of politics and philosophy by taking their positions to their extreme, in order to show their absurdity.
Right. His biggest schtick is to deliberately distort liberal positions and then attack the misrepresentations he's created. That's pretty much why people he pokes fun of don't like him - because he's intellectually dishonest and doesn't care how badly he distorts his opponent's position, as long as it scores him points.
hmmm .... Stephen Colbert .... Bill Maher ... John Stewart .... George Carlin ...
Why no outrage when they do (did, in Carlin's case) the same?
I don't know Colbert from a fence post. I mean, I have a rough idea of who he is and what he's about, but I've never seen or heard him. I could sit next to him on a plane all the way to Auckland and never know who he was. And from what I've heard about him, I wouldn't much care.
Stewart.... pretty much the same. If you showed me a picture, I think I might recognize him as someone I've seen before, but that's about it. If I've ever heard him speak or seen him on television, I don't remember him by name. Or wait a minute... is he that guy from Saturday Night Live? Maybe I have seen him, but I don't remember anything about the experience if I did.
Carlin? That "hippy-dippy weatherman" thing was funny for about 5 minutes, 40 years ago. The "7 words you can't say on TV" or whatever it was called was sort of funny, too, but I can't remember why. His political utterings? If i ever did accidentally hear him rant about politics, I sure didn't pay enough attention to remember anything about it. The most relevant fact I can recall about George Carlin was that he was a textbook example of why people shouldn't smoke marijuana just before going on television. Given a choice between watching George Carlin and watching paint dry, I'm going to puill up a chair in front of the freshly-painted wall 10 times out of 9. In fact, come to think of, isn't he dead now? Unfortunate for him i suppose, but it can't have made him any less funny or any less interesting to me.
Maher.... OK, that's different. He's that guy who did "Politically Incorrect Television" or something like that a few years ago, right? If he's the guy I'm thinking of, I watched that a few times. I thought it was usually pretty funny, and quite topical, but I don't remember much about him. Seemed like a very bright, articulate, sincere guy, but I can't remember much about him beyond that.
The point here is I know next to nothing about those guys, because I do my best to pay absolutely no attention to the so-called "pundits" who infest our airwaves. I don't care whose side they're on, they all have two things in common - an agenda, and a biased delivery that is calculated to present their position in whatever way is most favorable to that agenda. I don't trust them, and I refuse to let people with biased agendas try to help me form my opinions. I prefer to form my own opinions based on my own understanding of the facts, and I tend to avoid the "headline news" networks like Fox and CNN because they're more about the headline than about the news. My main source of television news, outside the local channels, is the Bloomberg Channel, which i usually have on in the background all day. They're a litle bit limited in that they naturally filter all their news through the context of how it relates to the economy, but when you get down to it, just about every relevant piece of national and international news these days does come down to how it relates to the economy, and their near-total objectivity more than balances out their limited focus, in my opinion.
So as far as I'm concerned, those other guys might as well all live on Mars for all I even know what they're saying. I wish to god I could say the same about Rush Limbaugh, but I can't, because unfortunately that blowhard is apparently much better than those other guys at getting himself out in the limelight and making a celeberity out of himself, at making his message about himself rather than about the message. He pisses me off on a regular basis because he's in my face on a regular basis. And because every time he's in my face, he seems to be lying about who I am, what I believe in, and why i believe in it, because I'm a liberal and he makes his living lying about who liberals are and what they believe in. As you said, his whole schtick is to take a position and extend it to the point of absurdity, and when someone does that to a position I believe in and which I am trying to represent in good faith, I take offense and dislike that person. As I do him.
Now. Having said all that, I was a little surprised Al Franken didn't win a spot on your list. Had he done, I would have agreed with you 100% on him. I put Franken in roughly the same category as Limbaugh, and find him disgusting and offensive as a liberal and an American. I don't think he's anywhere near as dishonest as Limbaugh, but he more than makes up for that with his incredibly mean-spirited abrasiveness, his just-plain nastiness, and his complete lack of any personal charm whatsoever. He may be a lot more honest than Limbaugh, but in terms of personality, he's even more unpleasant than the dope addict, so they're pretty much even in my eyes. Can't stand either one of them. If I were king for 5 minutes, my first official act would be to have them both stuffed into a large (well, very large) gunny sack and dropped off a bridge somewhere.
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