Friday, June 09, 2006

Our media elite are idiots

Gawd what a moron. Bill Bennett, one of the foremost rightwing pundits in the media, goes on the Daily Show and gets his ass kicked by a comedian. Video via Crooks and Liars:
Stewart: So why not encourage gay people to join in in that family arrangement if that is what provides stability to a society?

Bennett: Well I think if gay..gay people are already members of families...

Stewart: What? (almost spitting out his drink)

Bennett: They're sons and they're daughters..

Stewart: So that's where the buck stops, that's the gay ceiling.

Bennett: Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a women.

Stewart:I disagree, I think it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.

Seriously, Bennett comes off looking like a sputtering neanderthal as all his best arguments fall impotently under Stewart's withering sarcasm. I am truly embarrassed for the mainstream media if this guy represents their best and brightest.

Even moreso, I am embarrassed for my country if these knuckledraggers are dictating our national conversation. And you wonder why the American people are so criminally misinformed?

As a side note, look in the clipped quote above where Stewart does something I've almost never seen a "liberal" pundit do: he refuses to accept Bennett's bullshit framing of the issue. Of course this isn't about marriage being between a man and a woman. You can tell Bennett's not used to a liberal actually questioning his frames; he seems to slouch slightly, fully cognizant that he just got clowned and will have to spend the rest of the conversation in damage control. Don't accept a bullshit frame: such a basic technique in sophisticated argumentation, yet so utterly unknown among our media "elites."

In other news, here we are now, 4 years down the road of having Ann Coulter paraded across the stage of every political news show on television, years after her lifting the national discourse on Middle Eastern policy with such gems as "We should kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," and saying that all liberals (roughly a quarter of the population) should be hung for treason, just for being liberals, and claiming the only real question about Bill Clinton was "whether to impeach or assassinate" (and that was in 1998, when Clinton was the sitting president).

Months after Coulter said in her syndicated column: "[T]he government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo."

A year and a half since she called an incident where a student threw a pie at her "an act of terrorism" and said that New Yorkers "would immediately surrender to terrorists."

Now, after 4 years of Coulter-mania, the media is actually starting to think that maybe, just maybe, this witch is a teensy bit hateful and fringe for mainstream discourse, now that she said of the 9/11 widows: "[T]hey believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process." [p.103] and "These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." [p.103] (via Media Matters).

Amazing how far to the right the boundary of acceptable discourse is when it took Coulter shitting on the families of American victims of terrorism to cross it. At least there is a line, though; I was almost convinced that Coulter would dryhump Nixon's corpse on national TV for the news media to call foul on her.

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