Hardly worth mentioning; not even a little bit funny since his SNL days.
I’ve read a couple of Buchanan’s books. Beyond whatever is demonstrated by his ability to write books, no, he is not reasonably intelligent.
Sure, Gingrich is intelligent, but he’s also conniving, unscrupled, and evil.
Well, you know, humor is subjective. Perhaps you are humor impaired, or maybe you just find different things funny. Personally, I always liked Dennis Miller. But then, I always liked Steven Wright too, and generally people don’t like him. shrug
-XT
Perhaps this is true, but I can say that I was a huge fan of Dennis Miller - I think the Off White album and Black and White video is filled with gut-busting genius stuff. He’s also from Pittsburgh, so I always felt a special affinity with him.
He really did change, and he now really does suck.
I agree with this – I used to love Dennis Miller. Watched him on the Weekend Update on SNL, then tried to catch his HBO series later. But anymore he’s jusy …awful. His last series was the pits.
I don’t know why this should be. It’s not partisan – an awful lot of his stuff was and is pretty neutral to politics, but even that stuff isn’t funny anymore.
To give him his due, he certainly brightens up when he’s a guest on some show like Leno’s, but it still isn’t up to his former standards.
For what it’s worth, I love Steve Wright. I was once lucky enough to be sitting front and center at a comedy club when he came on unannounced as a special guest.
Admittedly, I haven’t seen him do an entire stand up show in a while…maybe 6 years come to think of it. I saw him live in, I think, 2002 or 2003 IIRC. I’ve seen him on things like Leno, as you mentioned, and he seemed as funny as ever. Maybe his new stand up shows aren’t up to his old standards…but I know a lot of people who say he was never funny (and for some odd reason it DOES seem to be a partisan issue with some), so generally when I hear someone say he’s ‘not even a little bit funny since his SNL days’ I’m a bit skeptical.
-XT
Even a lot of our public intellectuals seem to inhabit a post-reality world. Understandable, really, when the only points of view that get very far in public discourse are a) a social-Darwinist marketocracy with God as CEO or b) a muddle of disconnected individual sensation where nothing really matters all that much. (In case it matters, I’m for b).)
There may be a third current developing, but it’s grassroots and splintered right now. It has no coherent thinking, just the numbers who elected a “yes we can” candidate. But it’s going to be difficult to really give it an intellectual foundation unless and until i) Obama begins to climb out of his rookie season and ii) some meaningful “we” really does begin to coalesce in American society. All it is now is a wish. We’re still just “I’s”, and we’re likely to remain so for quite a while.
I’m curious who you mean as “public intellectuals”. The closest I can think of on the left is Bill Moyers, and on the right is George Will, and I think they are both captive certain branches of their party’s line. As was William Buckley…
Every once in a while someone from academia shows up as a guest on some program who seems unbiased, though we don’t really know enough about them to discover if there is a bias.
I don’t think there’s anyone currently working in mass media, in America at least, who has earned the title “intellectual”.
Paul Krugman is a MIT PhD and on the faculty of the London School of Economics as well as Princeton. He’s also won a Nobel prize. Rachel Maddow is a Rhodes Scholar. Sanjay Gupta of CNN is an assistant Professor of neurosurgery at Emory and will be our next Surgeon General.
And on the right there’s Larry the Cable Guy
Rush Limbaugh went to college - for a semester - and failed all his classes.
Thanks. I was beginning to doubt there were any myself.
I read too many think pieces and sometimes forget that’s not really the “public” any more, but an elite.
Well you know what we Americans do when something gets in our way.
cue evil percussion pattern
We eliminate it.
We – Americans – are a national culture, we have always had and been a “we.” (Not everybody in America has always partaken in it equally but it has always been there.) What’s lacking and needed is a sense of “we” among all politically interested Americans to the left of the Pubs – something the conservative movement has had at least since the 1964 Goldwater campaign; and, next, a set of coherent intellectual foundations for that.
May be. Gupta is little more certain to be the next SG than Terry McAuliffe is to be the next Governor of VA.
Goddamit! With today’s market drop Obama has managed to wipe out all of the gains of the last eight years in the stock market and return us to the middle of the Clinton era (1997 in terms of Dow Value).
Eight years of hard work destroyed in a little over a month. Fucking Democrats!
sigh Funny how that happens . . . The stock market is not like a bull. The stock market is not like a bear. The stock market is like a small, nervous dog that runs under the bed from any loud noise and leaps uncontrollably at the hint of a treat. Any bit of news that might make a rational individual investor pessimistic or optimistic about a given stock is, in the collective of the whole investment community, somehow force-multiplied a thousandfold over the whole market, and the market tanks or soars. The individual investor can see clearly enough that it’s an irrational reaction, but that makes no difference, he or she has no choice but to get on the bandwagon, knowing that’s what every other investor will do.
Are you serious?