"Republicans are funnier"

Nearly 30 years ago, I sat in an auditorium with a bunch of college students pre-screening an otherwise unknown Hollywood comedy. The movie was pretty good, and the writer/directors nervously wanted to know, "would people pay money to see it."

The movie was "Airplane", which went on to wildly succesful and spin off a genre of zany comedies, and the writer/directors included the Zucker brothers.

I remember the guy in the seat next to me surprise me by getting up and asking why all the political humor was directed at Republicans. One of the Zuckers answered the question by saying that they thought that "Republicans were funnier." It was apparent that he never thought that anyone in a college town would object to poking fun at Republicans.

The world turns, and it seems that, now, one of the brothers is returning the favor and doing a parody bit on the zany Democrats. Obviously, in this day and age, "Democrats are funnier."

Ironic.

Man bites Dog

This is different; a liberal concerned about democracy being eroded by the gay marriage decision.

Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Fellow and Research Director, is concerned that cautious liberal politicians have been unfairly branded as "bigots" for favoring domestic partnership laws, but he is also concerned about democracy:

Another cost is that slow drip-by-drip accretion of power to courts, that steady undermining of the right of people to govern themselves. In California, the deprivation of that right is exquisitely on display, for the compromise the court upset involved decades of negotiation and movement. The nucleus of California's domestic partnership law dates from the late 1970s. Over time, it has grown more generous, by 2006 including all of the rights and obligations of marriage. In 2000, however, the people of California voted overwhelmingly to limit marriage itself to opposite-sex unions. The legislature has twice voted to extend marriage to gay couples--and Governor Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed the bill. The current arrangement, in short, reflects a series of evolving compromises set against the backdrop of a quickly developing social consensus concerning the value and honor of same-sex relationships--a process that the court treated as just so much bother on the way to a self-evident truth. Once upon a time, this bother had a name. We called it democracy.

We may be too far down the road for this to matter. On a philosophy forum site that I was involved in last year, I found it impossible to get the other posters - most of whom were college age - to realize that democracy had an intrinsic value even if it resulted in decisions that were viewed as unfair. I suspect that attitude is shared by most twenty-somethings and a large percentage of older folks.

Hopefully, Wittes message gets some traction.

Too Good to Miss.

Keith Olberman is the picture next to the definition of "hypocrisy."

Paradise by the Radio Light.

National Public Radio is David Mamet's Bo Tree as he reconsiders his life-long commitment to "brain dead liberalism."

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

Interesting.