Official Liberal Funniness Rating: Bill Maher, Extremely Funny When He Calls Sarah Palin a C*** or a T***; Mark Halperin, Not Funny, When He Calls Obama A Dick

Drew has covered this, but I just want to keep score of what is and what is not funny in America circa 2011.

Yes, I know that Bill Maher and Mark Halperin have different jobs. Mark Halperin's job is to comment on the news and not be funny, and Bill Maher's job is... well, he does the same thing, but on HBO.

I understand that Halperin has, or is supposed to have, reporter cred, but he's offering his assessment. He did it in a funny way.

Of course, it's not funny, not for the media. Oh how they laugh when Bill Maher drops the c-bomb on Palin. But calling Obama a dick? Why that's just out-of-bounds.

Let me quote Charles Krauthammer, who calls Obama a dick in a language called mathematics.

He himself, as we just heard, said you can’t reduce the deficit to the levels we need without raising revenues. Then he talks about the [tax break for] corporate jets, which he mentioned not once but six times.

I did the math on this. If you collect the corporate jet tax every year for the next 5,000 years, you will cover one year of the debt that Obama has run up. One year.

To put it another way, if you started collecting that tax at the time of John the Baptist and you collected it every year — first in shekels and now in dollars — you wouldn’t be halfway to covering one year of the amount of debt that Obama has run up.

As for the other one, he mentions again and again, the oil depreciation tax break — if you collect that one for 700 years, you won’t cover a year of Obama deficits.

And then here’s my favorite. I worked it out in the car on the way here. If you collect the corporate jets and the oil tax together — get all the bad guys and the fat cats at once — and you collect it for 100 years, it covers the amount of debt Obama added… in February!

And he pretends that he’s the serious adult at the table.

I noted a while ago that the press is in a fix here. On one hand, they know, to be considered "serious minded people," they have to acknowledge the size of the debt problem, and of the demographic bomb we call entitlements. They have been talking up this problem since the 80s, at least.

All serious people know this. Even the liberal twits in the media who don't really understand this have heard other serious people talking about this and so know this is the serious, thoughtful position to take.

The fix for the media, then, is that their boyfriend Obama is explicitly contradicting what serious people know about our debt crisis, and is behaving like a demagogic toddler about it.

So what are they to do? They can't call him out; he is their Precious. On the other hand, they must feel a little intellectual inconsistency, by which I mean flat-out stupidity, in failing to note how breathtakingly unserious and devoid of any intent to lead Obama is on a truly crucial issue.

Oh, they diminish things like WeinerGate as trivial. Fine. They're largely right. That sort of thing is trivial.

But this? This is not trivial, and they have 30 years of commentary on this point stating it's not trivial they have to contend with.

So in a way this is sort of personal to them. They want desperately to spin for Obama and claim he's the adult at the table, the voice of reason, but what does he give them to work with? Babyfood and partisan demagoguery.

How can they accomplish both critical objectives -- flacking for Obama and appearing to be serious-minded people themselves -- when all he offers them is bullshit and dog-ate-my-homework abdication of duty?

posted by Ace at 01:42 PM

| Access Comments