May 30, 2008
EVEN IF ACCIDENTAL...:
Facts are for pantywaists: Liberals beware! Stephen Colbert's brand of comic neo-con nonsense is on the rise. (Ben Marshall, May 31, 2008, The Guardian)
Colbert has described his character as a fool. He is in fact something far funnier and more dangerous. Like Bush he is a bright man who embraces ignorance, exuberantly making up for his paucity of knowledge with the stridency and absurdity of his opinions. Indeed Colbert would probably argue, as Hillary Clinton did recently (on the ludicrous idea of gas tax holidays), that being well informed about an issue only helps to cloud it. Just like Colbert, Clinton dismissed experts as elitists. Colbert actually refers to experts as "factonistas" and claims there are more nerve endings in the human gut than there are in the human brain. "I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument," he boasts.
...that's a particularly good insight, that Hillary came on after letting loose her inner Colbertian. No one ever lost an election running against intellectual pretensions. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 30, 2008 10:17 PM
Comments
Colbert is center-left and a gunbanner, but he's funny and he skewers both sides. Not necessarily equally, but enough to make him watchable. He's what Stewart was before Bush was elected.
Posted by: Pete at May 31, 2008 1:17 PMIIRC, Churchill said experts should always be on tap, but never on top. Makes sense to me as a leader, a decision maker, has to weigh different concerns that an expert does not have to do.
Posted by: Mikey at June 1, 2008 12:32 PM