Republican Humor

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcKw9_4O4f8]

It looks like Saturday Night Live has recaptured the humor of its early years. No, wait, this isn’t an SNL satire of a Republican ad. It is a real Republican ad. (Hat top to Josh Marshall.)

Kevin Drum quotes Hendrik Hertzberg writing about YearlyKos:

No one naked around here. No chaos at YearlyKos. No “sweet smell of marijuana,” as the straight papers used to refer to it. No demands for revolution. No denunciations of bourgeois democracy. The Democratic National Committee Chairman is listened to respectfully and cheered enthusiastically.

I think the difference between today’s left and yesterday’s is partly explained by the difference between the wars that have energized them. Vietnam was, as Bob Dole might say, a “Democrat war.” You couldn’t protest it just by putting your energies into electing Democrats, and of course you couldn’t do it by trying to elect Republicans, who liked the war even more. You had to go to the left of the Dems, and if you hadn’t happened to have already acquired a moral/political compass, you might keep going till you ended up at the feet of Chairman Mao. This war is an all-Republican affair. And this generation, thank God, is perfectly content to stick with Chairman Howard.

Kevin adds:

What’s happening now isn’t a youth revolt, and it’s not powered by free love, free acid, or fear of being drafted. It’s powered by a lot of bog ordinary moderate liberals who have been radicalized by George Bush and the Newt Gingrichized Republican Party. I think a lot of journalists (though I don’t mean to include Hertzberg here) don’t quite get this because they haven’t internalized just how far off the rails the modern Republican Party has gone. Until they do, they’re going to continue to misunderstand what’s happening.

There is a lot of nutty stuff posted at Kos, which is bound to happen at any community blog of that size. Kos has even written some nutty stuff of his own, which I’ve sometimes commented on here. His comments on the contractors killed in Iraq were inappropriate, and during the 2004 election Daily Kos was removed from the blogroll at the official Kerry blog because of this. He made a mistake and appears to have learned from it–which is far more than can be said about the hatred which continues to come from the right, including many of those who are now attacking Democrats for appearing at YearlyKos.

At least this is consistent. The Bush campaign screened people at their campaign rallys to keep out those who disagree with him.  Most of the current Republican candidates are afraid to answer questions posed by users of YouTube. In contrast, Democrats are willing to appear before normal people who utilize the internet, but Republicans attack them for this.

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