You mean Congress “Entertainer”.
He’s been getting away with this fucking excuse for far too long, and it’s bullshit. When he spouts far right crap and the dittoheads call up to praise him, he basks in it, but when someone calls him on his many mistakes, suddenly “He’s just an entertainer!”
You don’t read Free Republic, do you? While it’d be nice to think that that whole web site is full of Democratic operatives having fun, after awhile you just realize, holy shit, these people are serious!
So…Rush was Colbert before Colbert was Colbert?
I’ll believe that the same day I see a quote from Rush about how he doesn’t mean the crap he spews, and that he just does it to make fun of the righties.
Apparently, Mr. Trainor has a varied interests. Not satisfied with bigotry, he also dabbles in being a nutjob.
Where do ETs figure into a B.A.C.'s world-view, I wonder?
Well, I think the one thing we can all agree on is that the little gray SpaceBacks shouldn’t be getting welfare.
-Joe
Build a ceiling!
It’s not an excuse, Czarcasm. It’s what he is. It’s his game. It’s how he makes his money. Every one of those mistakes gets him more press, more publicity, more recognition. Every time someone buys one of his controversial statements, it’s cash in his pocket. He’s not using “being an entertainer” as an excuse; he’s using it as a bank deposit.
Oh, no. Colbert clearly doesn’t believe what he’s saying, and it’s intended as parody. I think Rush does believe most of what he says, but he exaggerates and plays it up and makes mountains out of molehills.
The difference is that some political commentators and talk show hosts (think Al Franken) really are trying to make a difference. I believe that Rush Limbaugh is trying to make money. And he can do that best by being entertaining and controversial and keeping his name in the headlines.
So he believes what he says, he’s not doing parody, and he’s trying to make money. Do i understand you correctly?
If so, then your attempt to draw a distinction between Rush as entertainer and Rush as political commentator is completely pointless and spurious. If he is not doing parody, and he believes what he says, and he discusses political issues, then he is a political commentator. Period. The fact that he might also be an entertainer is completely irrelevant.
Take the other example used right here: Stephen Colbert. While he is an entertainer, and he is doing parody, the fact is that he is also a political commentator. The very fact that his parody is often directed explicitly at political topics makes him, by definition, a political commentator.
You seem to believe, for some bizarre reason that i can’t fathom, that “political commentator” and “entertainer” are two mutually exclusive categories.They’re not.
You’re argument also completely elides the issue of audience reception and response. You dismiss Rush as political commentator with an airy wave of the hand, noting merely that “there are a whole lot of “dittoheads” that don’t understand” that he’s just an entertainer. But the fact is that millions of people take his political pronouncement seriously, including more than a few in the halls of power.
When a person makes public pronouncements; when he makes those pronouncements on political issues; when he believes the substance of what he’s saying; and when he is taken seriously by a large number of people; then he’s a political commentator, and your contrasting of “political commentator” and “entertainer” boils down to a distinction without a difference.
You’re just hung up on old-fashioned notions like “truth” and “accuracy”. Rush has moved beyond those things.
And begun under Eisenhower.
True enough, although at least Ike was honest enough to admit that Ho Chi Minh would easily have won a free, fair and democratic election, had one been allowed to proceed in Vietnam.
When did he make that admission, during or after his presidency?
I envy people who feel like this has to be a gag. I hear political opinions this ridiculous and offensive (and worse) every single day from real people in real life.
I assume that his comments on the need to round up illegal aliens were cut from the letter for reasons of, er, space.
Well, the certainty of Ho Chi Minh winning an election was conceded by basically everyone in Vietnam in the mid-1950s. Eisenhower’s own Indochina specialists told him exactly that.
Whether Eisenhower admitted this knowledge during his presidency is not clear to me. He certainly made it clear enough in his memoir, Mandate for Change, which was published in 1963. In that book, he said:
Eisenhower’s book isn’t available online, but you can find the quote at the bottom of p. 126 of William Blum’s Killing Hope, viewable in Google Books here.
Also, Blum mentions a National Intelligence Estimate from 1954. That estimate says:
That is from National Intelligence Estimate 63-7-54, dated November 23, 1954.
Because the CIA’s FOIA Reading Room is retarded and provides no way to link directly to individual documents, i’ve uploaded the relevant page (pdf) to my webspace.
They’ve been important in more than a few elections. I don’t know if they’re as important as the letter in the OP claims, but losing even a fraction of their votes would have lost Bush 2 both elections. Considering they were a group that voted in record numbers both times, I’d say they’re at least partially responsible for Dubbya.