Tea Party

Lying Is Easy, Comedy Is Hard

Posted by on June 9, 2009 at 3:20 pm. NO Comments :

Anyone who has ever tried to make an audience laugh knows how deceptively easy a talented comic can make their job look. The truth is, it is so difficult to do well that there is a famous (but difficult to source) quote reportedly made from an actor’s deathbed: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

It’s going to get a lot harder for people like Jon Stewart. The competition is heating up with some of the most hilarious, and unexpected, entrants into the field of funny. Republicans from around the country are trying out their best material in an effort to amuse and deceive audiences nationwide.

First up is Republican National Committee Chairman, Michael Steele, who cracked up a room of College Republicans with his famous “Hat” routine. The premise is that it doesn’t matter how you wear your hat (to the side, backwards, etc) so long as it is a GOP hat:

I’m asking you to go out and ask your friends to wear our hat. The hat of an idea.

For this bit, Steele had four students stand so that he could pretend to put imaginary hats on them. Steele intuitively knew that the bit would be much funnier with audience members standing there for no purpose other than to grin and display their naked heads. And I have to admire the deeper meaning of the invisible hats of ideas that obviously represent the GOP’s absence ideas.

The setup included a dire admonition that Barack Obama “has asked your generation to wear his hat.” I must have missed that speech. But I did see Steele’s previous speech where he promised to deliver “change in a tea bag.” How does he keep coming up with this brilliant material?

And then there is Bill O’Reilly. In a sidesplitting debate over torture and abortion, O’Reilly challenged Juan Williams to explain why liberals object to torture but defend abortion providers like Dr. George Tiller. Williams attempted, through O’Reilly’s interruptions, to answer saying that torture is against both domestic and international law, but Tiller’s work was entirely legal. To which O’Reilly responded:

“You can dance the law dance all day long. And laws are passed by men. Laws can be revoked. They can be passed.”

The joke, as O’Reilly sees it, is the law itself. It’s just a dance and we don’t really need to comply with it because it’s just stuff that some people came up with in legislatures and courtrooms. Just imagine the comical scenarios that would ensue if we extend O’Reilly’s view of the law to burglary, rape, and terrorism. I can see O’Reilly now, defending Osama Bin Laden before a military tribunal, doing a jig while testifying that he can “dance the law dance all day long.” After all, the laws against flying planes into buildings could be revoked.

Almost as funny as his legal pirouettes is his contention that “the attorney general ruled waterboarding was not torture. It was legal.” As if the attorney general has the judicial standing to make such a ruling. He isn’t a judge. The best he can offer is an opinion, and you would think that O’Reilly has enough of those of his own. And to compound the laugh factor, O’Reilly seems perfectly satisfied to accept the constraints of the law (as he misinterprets it) with regard to waterboarding, even though he dismisses the law as it applies to abortion. Who’s dancing now?

This brings us to Newt Gingrich who made this declaration last night:

“Let me be clear. I am not a citizen of the world!”

I’m going to guess Plutonian, because he is just so out there, stretching the comedy envelope. He is objecting to a part of Obama’s speech wherein he referred to himself as “a citizen of the world.” I wonder if Gingrich knows that John F. Kennedy, George H. W. Bush, and even Ronald Reagan used the very same phrase. Gingrich also mined comedy gold by railing against the “fact” that our nation’s school curriculum doesn’t include American history. Makes you wonder how closely he was paying attention.

It’s going to be hard for working comics and satirists to compete with the new Republican Rubber Chicken Society. Not many people are better at spinning lies…er…stories than desperate Republican politicians and pundits. It may be too much to ask our professional laugh-smiths to create humor from scratch when the GOP can just pull it out of their butts. I mean, how can you compete with headlines like:
“Fox Newser Accused of Dragging Cyclist Through Central Park.” And:
“Peter Doocy [Steve’s boy] Joins Fox News.” And:
“Sarah Palin Mystifies and Annoys the Republican Establishment.”
“Coburn’s STD Lecture to Congressional Interns Put On Hold Due to Pizza Dispute.”

Yes, those are real. And so is the danger that reality will make comedians obsolete. Thanks GOP.

News Blights: Re-Branding Edition

Posted by on May 13, 2009 at 3:06 pm. NO Comments :

Item #1: The Republican National Committee is planning to meet in a special session next week. One of the items on their agenda will be a resolution to re-brand the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party.” I’d like to go on record as saying that I have no problem with this as long as I can re-brand Republicans as the “National Socialist Party.”

Item #2: Has Sarah Palin signed a deal to write her memoirs? You betcha! And she’s signed with HarperCollins, the publishing arm of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. The book will be co-marketed by Harper’s Christian imprint, Zondervan.The publisher says that Palin will work with a collaborator, but Palin’s agent says that every word in the book will be hers. Which begs the question: What’s the collaborator for? Perhaps she’ll need someone to keep an eye on Russia while she’s hammering out her tales of hunting Moose on the tundra – also.

Item #3: Tea Bagger Redux. The Republican Governors Association, led by South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Texas Secessionist Rick Perry, are attempting to launch Tea Party 2.0. However, this one will be strictly phoned in as it is being arranged as a conference call. The organizational role of the GOP should serve to affirm that the Tea Partiers are indeed a partisan operation, but we may want to wait until Fox News comes aboard before final certification.

Item #4: Louisiana Senator David Vitter is also jumping on the Tea Party bandwagon. He is calling for teabaggers to come together again to “Stand up and fight this July 4th, and make Washington, DC listen to you.” Vitter is redirecting considerable resources from his patronage of prostitutes so that he can promote a Tea Party that is sponsored by his reelection committee (Seriously. The website for this project was “Paid for by David Vitter for U.S. Senate”). We’ll see how many people give up their barbecues and fireworks in exchange for an afternoon of teabaggery. It’s brews vs. brewed.

Janeane Garofalo Gets The Last Laugh On Sean Hannity And The Tea Baggers

Posted by on May 9, 2009 at 10:47 am. 2 Comments :

Last month, Janeane Garofalo appeared on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. In the course of the interview, she made some rather controversial comments about the those attending the Fox News sponsored Tea Parties:

“…let’s be very honest about what this is about. It’s not about bashing Democrats, it’s not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about, they don’t know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.”

Subsequent to that appearance, Sean Hannity, and a phalanx of other feverish right-wingers, immediately went on the attack. They criticized Garofalo for expressing her views, and Olbermann for allowing her to do so. Mind you, these are the same defenders of the First Amendment that are now complaining that the noted racist schlock jock, Michael Savage, has been banned from the U.K. To them, in other words, speech by a racist is fine, but speech about racists is foul.

In an attempt to further chastise Garofalo, and even harm her professionally, Hannity promoted this story which he prefaced by saying that “Revenge is sweet…”

Hannity (4/29/09): “The Boston Herald reports that supporters of the Boston tea party protests earlier this month. well they’re planning to attend one of her upcoming stand up performances. And they plan to give her a piece of their mind […] tickets, by the way, are reportedly going fast. Unfortunately for the left-wing actress, many of the tickets are being sold to the same tea partiers that she labeled racist […] It looks like Janeane isn’t going to get the last laugh this time around. By the way, good luck in Boston.”

Hannity and the tea baggers had better exercise some restraint in doling out pieces of their minds. They seem to have little to spare. First of all, the clown who came up with idea to scoop up tickets to Garofalo’s show in order to hurt her by making her richer is truly hilarious. Secondly, Hannity offers no evidence whatsoever that any tickets were sold to tea baggers, much less “many” as Hannity claimed. Lastly, the threat to which Hannity is referring from the article in the Herald really comes down to a single anonymous e-mailer with anger management issues:

“This (bleep) is gonna hear it from Boston,” the anonymous e-mailer said. “All us bigots and racists are buying up tix to let this piece of excrement hear it from us. shame on her.”

Despite the cantankerous warning from the mad e-mailer, and Hannity’s free publicity for it, the turnout of angry tea baggers was decidedly underwhelming. In fact, according to an update in the Herald, Garofalo performed her entire, nearly sold-out set without interruption from inside or outside the theater. She even had a bit of fun with them on stage saying…

“If there are any tea baggers here, welcome, and white power.”

As it turns out, Hannity’s contention that “many of the tickets” were sold to tea baggers was, not surprisingly, a lie. And it looks like Garafalo did end up getting the last laugh. But Hannity was right about one thing: Revenge is sweet.

A Tale Of Two Tea Parties

Posted by on April 16, 2009 at 3:24 pm. 1 Comments :

Now that Tax Day has come and gone, we can take an objective look at what all the excitement over the so-called “grassroots” Tea Party movement has wrought.

For an alleged phenomenon that was sweeping a nation of angry revolutionaries, it has left us with no more than a resounding thud. Nate Silver has produced what appears to be the only comprehensive estimate of national attendance, based on authoritative sources like law enforcement and local reporting. His figures conclude that about 262,000 people gathered in over 300 cities across the country to wave tea bags and denounce taxes. That is pretty close to the estimate by the conservative Pajamas Media (sources not disclosed), who place the figure slightly higher at 278,000. Considering the fact that twice as many people will attend a Major League Baseball game on a typical Saturday, every weekend, that doesn’t seem like much to brag about.

Unfortunately, they can’t even blame their failure on their favorite foes. While they fretted for weeks about the Soros-backed ACORN busing in scary community organizers to disrupt their tea bagging, there were no reports of such sabotage. So after failing to preemptively construct an excuse for their flop, they are now accusing the media of neglecting to provide coverage. In truth, the media assigned a fairly appropriate amount of coverage to something so insignificant. And since this was a project that was wholly owned by Fox News, why should the rest of the press go out of their way to give more exposure to their competitor’s programming?

What’s more, it may be unprecedented in the history of public protesting that a major TV network acted as the national coordinating committee and PR agency for a partisan movement. Fox News executed a wall-to-wall campaign promoting these events and their own participation in them. They shamelessly recruited viewers to take up the cause and sent their biggest stars out as enticements. They worked closely with the Astroturf event sponsors and the Republican Party, and provided them with valuable air time to market their “spontaneous” uprising. Advocates and organizers were frequent on-air guests in the days leading up to the 15th. The actual value of all of the accumulated advertising is difficult to estimate, but if a 30-second ad costs about $10,000, and the Fox promo ran once an hour for a week (a modest assumption), that would come to over $1.6 million of free promotion. And that doesn’t include interviews with the party planners conducted during their programming. You know…political product placement.

So what did they get for that investment? Here is a photo of a few dozen rather bored looking revolutionaries at a Tea Party held in Los Angeles, CA., the nation’s second most populous city.

Contrast that with the success of another demonstration in Los Angeles just two years prior, protesting the war in Iraq:

That anti-war rally drew over 6,000 people without the help of the #1 cable news network. More than a million participated nationwide. It was a bona fide grassroots operation populated by citizens with a sincere and deeply felt grievance against their government, not unlike those who attended the Tea Parties. Nevertheless, Fox News not only didn’t contribute to the event’s promotion, they barely covered it while it was in progress – except to disparage the participants as unpatriotic and shiftless. There was no Sean Hannity in Chicago interviewing Michael Moore. There was no Glenn Beck on stage with Neil Young in San Francisco. The Tea Partiers, however, received over four hours of live coverage of their comparatively inconsequential congregations. That’s a lot of broadcast real estate for something that has almost zero news value.

Throughout the build up to, and the coverage of, Tea Party Day, Fox News played the role of cheerleader. They portrayed the protesters as loyal citizens with a justifiable outrage at what they viewed as the government’s usurpation of authority. They praised their courage for denouncing the President and the Congress. That lies in stark contrast to the Fox News characterization of anti-war protesters and Bush opponents as dirty hippies and terrorist sympathizers. Fox routinely asserted that those examples of free speech were unpatriotic and that failure to support the President was akin to treason.

In one respect I have to give them credit. Some of those who used to holler at dissidents to “love it or leave it,” are now demonstrating a measure of consistency. The governor of Texas has broached the notion that his state may be interested in seceding from the union. The state senate in Georgia is following his lead. Sarah Palin’s Alaska has long had a thriving secessionist movement. The cries of “America First” during last year’s presidential campaign were apparently just a ruse. As soon as they are on the losing side of an election they can’t get out of the country fast enough. If that’s what they really want, they can go with my blessing. So long as they let California go as well.

It is a disturbing reality of modern media that an entity like Fox News exists purely to package their partisan agenda in an attempt to influence society’s opinions and policies. But on the plus side, look at how miserably ineffective they turned out to be despite having the biggest megaphone in the cable news arena. If this is the best they can do with millions of dollars and weeks of preparation, maybe it isn’t all that disturbing after all.

Some Tea Party Tidbits You May Have Missed

Posted by on April 15, 2009 at 4:43 pm. 8 Comments :

The Tea Baggers must be proud of their little parties. Even though attendance has fallen far short of their expectations, they were able to get their message out thanks to their media sponsor, Fox News. Media Matters has compiled a nice little montage of videos from various Tea Vee sources:

But there was so much more. For instance, Joe the (fake) Plumber had this to say at a Michigan TP:

“Let me give you another extremist view, ‘In God We Trust.’ Say that too loud in some parts of America and you will be shot. It’s terrible.”

Joey the P didn’t bother to specify what part of the country that would be. I can’t think of any place where militant atheists are knocking off folks who quote from currency. However, I can think of whole regions (I’m looking at you southerners) where fanatical gun enthusiasts revel in making violent threats directed at liberals, minorities, or anyone they view as different. Amongst those southerners is Texas governor Rick Perry, whose tea party address sounded more like a call for a new Confederacy:

“We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.”

If Texas wants out of America, I say let them go – and take the rest of the south with them. I’m sure they’ll be very happy in their theocratic utopia, railing against imagined threats of Socialism – or worse, as Cody Willard from Fox Business News demonstrates by urging us to fight the Fascism that’s permeating the country:

Glenn Beck’s Acute Paranoia Revue took to the road to host the Alamo’s tea fest. The entire hour featured musical accompaniment from the Motor City Jackass, Ted Nugent, who famously taunted Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Barack Obama to “suck on” the end of his assault rifle.

Neil Cavuto attended a lame rally in Sacramento, CA, where he interviewed a girl who appeared to be about nine years old. He tried valiantly to put words in her mouth to the effect that she was there as a committed protester, not because her parents made her be there. But she defiantly refused and, at the end of the segment, she shouted at him that she was really there because she got to cut school. Nice try, Neil.

Cavuto and Beck devoted two full hours of live programming to the Tea Bagging. That’s a huge chunk of broadcast real estate. And it isn’t over. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Greta Van Susteren have yet to air. Hannity and Van Susteren previously announced that their programs would be live with the TPers.

I’m sure there are going to be an untold bounty of both comical and disturbing episodes erupting in the hours and days to come. But these were a few that I didn’t want to let get away. Fox News will begin spinning the days events into a fantastical misrepresentation of reality this evening. At least the truth about Fox’s role as the PR agency for the Republican Party (and the Tea Party) is becoming better understood by more people. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has summoned the courage to honestly portray today’s events:

“[W]e call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.”

That’s it in a wingnut shell.

Fox News: Get Ready To Tea Party

Posted by on April 15, 2009 at 1:24 am. 4 Comments :

The astroturf-roots charades that Fox News has been reporting as “Tea Parties” are almost here. Tomorrow is the big day and Fox has been ramping up their promotions. It has been well documented that these shams were conceived and executed by major players in the Republican Party and affiliated partisan advocacy groups like FreedomWorks. But now Keith Olbermann has put together a brilliant montage that shows just how hard Fox has been working to make these events successful.

The giddy elation these people project is reminiscent of a six year old being told that tomorrow the family is going to Disneyland. This has to be the high point of the year for these pathetic souls. The anticipation with which they are dripping seems to fill them with ecstasy. They apparently have gotten over their fear that ACORN’s Soros-backed community organizers are lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce just as their festivities get under way.

The White House is reacting to the day of revolting right-wingers in a particularly appropriate way:

QUESTION: Thanks, Robert. Tomorrow is tax day and a number of conservative groups are organizing these so called “tea parties” across the country; there are going to be grassroots uprising revolts against the administration’s policies so far. Is the President aware that these are going on and do you have any reaction to this?

ROBERT GIBBS: I don’t know if the President is aware of the events. I think the President will use tomorrow as a day to have an event here at the White House to signal the important steps in the economic recovery and reinvestment plan that cut taxes for 95 percent of working families in America, just as the President proposed doing; cuts in taxes and tax credits for the creation of clean energy jobs.

We’ll use tomorrow to highlight individual and instances in families that have seen their taxes cut and I think America can be — Americans will see more money in their pockets as a direct result of the Making Work Pay tax cut that the President both campaigned on and passed through Congress.

First of all, the reporter who asked the question needs to be schooled on what constitutes a “grassroots uprising revolt.” When the organizing principals are political insiders like Dick Armey and Ari Fleischer, and the PR is run by Fox News, it is beyond absurd to describe it as grassroots. More to the point, though, it’s nice to see that President Obama is not devoting much attention to this. The Tea Baggers can throw their pity party in the vast wasteland of their imaginations.

For those of you contemplating joining in on the Tea Bagging, I have this word of advice: Be careful out there. The crazy is extra thick.

Update: President Obama: For too long, we’ve seen taxes used as a wedge to scare people into supporting policies that actually increased the burden on working people instead of helping them live their dreams. That has to change, and that’s the work that we’ve begun.

Fox News Tea Baggers Consumed With Fear

Posted by on April 9, 2009 at 10:14 am. 6 Comments :

The upcoming Tax Day Tea Parties are shaping up to be a source of unending hilarity. A week before the event, supporters are already fretting over their self-invented fears of being infiltrated by the liberal, Soros-sponsored, ACORN hordes, who apparently have nothing better to do than disrupt the Foxbots’ Mad Hatter Fests.


[Isn’t it a little disrespectful to place a used tea bag on the American flag, staining it?]

The right-wing blogosphere is all atwitter with anxiety at the thought of lefties crashing their lame parties. Take a look at some of these examples:

Michele Malkin: And on the ground, the tax-subsidized and Soros-subsidized troops are going to try and wreak havoc every way they can. Many readers and fellow bloggers have seen signs that ACORN may send in ringers and saboteurs to usurp the anti-tax, anti-reckless spending, anti-bailout message.

Neil Cavuto: Only eight days before a nationwide tea party, some over-caffeinated crashers aiming to lay waste to it. Reports of very well-organized infiltrators trying to mix in and rain on this parade. Talk about taxing.

Townhall: The latest attack from the left is not aimed at the Republican party or Michael Steele or Rush Limbaugh, but at Democrat, Republican and Independent Americans across the country who have dared to organize “tea parties” to oppose rising taxes, more government control over private enterprise and less individual liberty.

I’m still having trouble grasping how the right can view liberals as weak, tottering, appeasers of Socialism, yet still fear their foreboding presence at a political rally. It parallels their thoroughly illogical perception of President Obama as lacking the courage or strength to be an effective leader, yet he is also a tyrannical despot plotting to enslave America and bend the world to his will.

The truth about these astroturf-roots charades is that they are nothing more than promotions for Fox News. They are pitched on the air and on Fox Nation. At least four Fox “personalities” are hosting the events (Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto, Sean Hannity, and Greta Van Susteren). Fox even describes them as “FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES.”

Any other news enterprise that covers these shams is acting as Fox’s PR agency. Would Fox hype NBC’s Today show concerts outside their Manhattan studio? Of course not. The press should ignore these staged commercial publicity traps and cease to be bullied into providing free advertising for their competition. The only coverage these jokers deserve is on The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live.