GOP Failure Watch Part II

So, Why Do Conservatives Fail at The Funny?

Intentionally funny, that is. It's a review of a book by an academic (and disappointed Dennis Miller fan) named Alison Dagnes, and the book is called A Conservative Walks Into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor

Fox News Channel began broadcasting "The 1/2 Hour News Hour," which was billed as “a conservative Daily Show.” It was a spectacular flop, because it put politics before humor. “It was mostly just loud and complainy with not a whole lot of basis in fact or reality,” says the Saturday Night Live writer Alex Baze. A writer for The 1/2 Hour News Hour told Dagnes that Fox News censored the best material because it was deemed “too controversial.” Surveying this landscape, Dagnes concludes that conservatism is philosophically incompatible with satire. “The nature of conservatism does not meet the conditions necessary for political satire to flourish: conservatism is harmonized and slow to criticize people in power, and it originates from a place that repudiates humor because it is absolute.”​

​

 

Just saw Jon Voigt at the RNC convention and he explained his extreme dislike of Barack Obama and how Obama had learned his use of propaganda at the knee of Saul Alinsky.



Great stuff

 

President Obama says, Say What?

 

Yeah, I don't think that's quite it, especially given the Tea Party's popularity comes from a persecution complex. I think it's more that conservative thought is based on dogma and mythology, and satire requires you to step away from the material. But if your POV is based on a belief than a fact, you can't step away from the material.

 

See liberals, it is a big tent!

 

Yeah. Luckily, so did the author of the review right after that quote.

In addition, there's a reason why so many of Obama's opponents have to question the very legitimacy of his presidency. From the outright lunacy of the Birthers to the more subtle dog whistling that you heard at the convention last night, they work really hard to claim he doesn't deserve the authority, therefore he is subject to attacks and disrespect in the ways that legitimate authorities are not.

 

Actually, the author probably was correct in writing that conservatives respect authority. Tea Partiers aren't conservative, not in the traditional sense of a conservative being somebody who likes things as they are and who is a defender of the nation's institutions.

 

That's a good point. Andrew Sullivan advanced a similar version of it when he distinguished his (conservative) views from those allegedly conservative views of the TP. He was especially concerned about the TPs tendency to attack established institutions, like say the government and universities. You can't really call your movement "conservative, says Sullivan, if you are all about disrupting or even ending stablizing institutions.

 

You also can't call yourself conservative if your movement's symbol is an act of destruction.

 

Wow.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...f792-f238-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_graphic.html

 

But HouseHead, the Tea Party is not racist. That's an invention of the liberal media.

 

Newsroom Faux Commentary hits the elephant right on the head

 

Reminds me of the Bill Maher joke,which goes something like, "there are two things the Tea Party can't stand....The first thing is being called racist, the second thing is black people."

 

Well, at least now they're on step one: Acceptance....



Or may be not...

 

OK, that's funny.

I haven't been following the We Built It fetish. It clearly has Republicans worked up. Let me take a guess. Family advantages don't matter, government roads don't matter, the army protecting you doesn't matter, government loans don't matter, government education doesn't matter, government regulations don't matter, that all these many many many things that make living in the U.S. different than living in Lord of the Flies don't matter, and if we say they do matter then we're taking credit away from some millionaire who deserves every single bit of credit for every dime that he ever made, and none of these institutions deserve one bit.

That about right?

 

Pretty much.

 

Republicans, I pretty much expected, but independents? Holy shit.

 

I'm actually not surprised, since most independents I know see bashing Mitt as bashing success.

 

The nearest equivalent to the tea party isn't 'conservatism' in the sense it was meant, say, 30 or 40 years ago because, as you say, they wanted to maintain the status quo. The tea party is driven by 'patriotism', (for which another word could be said to be 'nationalism'), and, as someone else said, a sense that someone, somewhere is short-changing the 'ordinary folks' like they are. Of course, the people FUNDING the tea party aren't ordinary folks but then, I doubt they believe all the horse-shit anyway.

No, the nearest equivalent I can think of is best described in this, slightly edited, piece...

The doctrine not only called for a "back to the land" approach and re-adoption of family values; it held that American land was bound, perhaps mystically, to American blood. Ordinary Americans were the Tea-party cultural heroes, who held charge of American racial stock and American history—as when a memorial of an uprising which became the occasion for a speech by a tea-party leader, praising them as force and purifier of American history. This would also lead them to understand the natural order better, and in the end, only the man who worked the land really possessed it. Urban culture was decried as a weakness, "asphalt culture", that only the Tea-party leadership's will could eliminate—sometimes as a code for Jewish influence.​

It contributed to the Tea-party ideal of a woman: an ordinary female who worked the land and bore strong children, contributing to praise for athletic women tanned by outdoor work. A 'mama-grizzly' as one might say.​

The language isn't mine and is too flamboyant to 'scan' properly but that's because it originated here.

This occurred to me a while ago when I read of the Nazi attitudes to art. As wikipedia says, entirely ordinary rural scenes were given significance with names such as 'German Land', mirroring the tea-party's professed love of 'Merca'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil#Fine_art

Again, make a few substitutions and it sounds pretty much like a description of their hatred of the liberal, (particularly Hollywood), elite to me.

 

Natioanalist, corporatist, supremacist... That sounds about right for the Teaparty....

Made look into this document again.... Scary stuff..

http://rense.com/general37/char.htm

Fourteen Defining ​

Characteristics Of FascismBy Dr. Lawrence Britt​

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - 'Merica #1
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Let him die!!!!
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause -
4. Supremacy of the Military - Support our troops!!!
5. Rampant Sexism - Rape is just another form of conception...
6. Controlled Mass Media - Faux News..
7. Obsession with National Security - Muslim Lesbian Cabal is taking over Washington
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Founding fathers were Christians and wanted the Bible to be the guiding chart.
9. Corporate Power is Protected - Regulations are a problem
10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Union busting in Wisconsin..
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Liberul Elltists...
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - If you are innocent you have nothing to fear...
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Great thing to have a CEO as president..
14. Fraudulent Elections - Citizens United, TP ellection squads...

 

There's a good article to be written on the similarities between Tea Partyism and Putinism.

 

The other scary part of the new reality is that we have been like frogs in the boiling pot...

Governments have slowly shifted to the right during the last 30 years without people noticing, and now the left wing is basically center left if that much, while the extreme right does not stand as so extreme...

 

I don't know if that's true in Europe. Maybe to an extent with the markets, but Lord knows that's not a bad thing. Poland of today is much much better off than Poland 1982.

I mean, when I talk to my coworkers in the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden, they seem like Americans were in the 1970s ... reasonably optimistic, content with being a part of a larger society, content to participate in that society. When I travel with Australians and Scots and Canadians, ditto.

Whereas the States these days has so many haters and whiners and moaners and shirkers and people who think they owe nothing to nobody nohow.

I think we've changed a lot more than those in other developed countries.

 

Last night, millions tuned in to watch a reality show about crazy rednecks behaving irresponsibly. But even more tuned into "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" ​

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/honey-boo-boo-ratings-republican-national-convention-367022​

 

I'd like to say that's because Americans have discerning tastes. But that would be a stretch.