Tiring of Hypocrisy

There's a radio show I listen to with some frequency (no pun intended) called the Stephanie Miller show. It is unabashedly left wing, but it is primarily a humor show. There is certainly political content, but it makes me laugh and that's much of why I listen.

But what frustrates me is that the host tends to do damage to her own arguments. Given my feelings regarding the current Administration, I find myself in agreement with much of the focus of her show of late (because being liberal, of course, she's also in opposition to the President, although for somewhat more partisan reasons than I am).

However... she plays the same "fast and loose" with conservative quotes that I'm getting so tired of in the right wing talking points machine. In particular, about three months back, she was on one of the news networks as one of the commentators talking about Stephen Colbert's turn at the Correspondents Dinner in Washington.

One of the lines Mr. Colbert used was (paraphrased) "This is a man who sticks by his convictions. He believes the same thing on Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday."

Now, one of the Right Wing commentators on the show made a big stink about how tasteless this was, because 9/11 was also a Tuesday, and I think this was a bit of a stretch. But ever since that time, that has been one of the "go to" drops on the Stephanie Miller show whenever they want to show an example of specious arguments on the Right, and the always characterize it as that the Right Wing pundit in question was saying that she objected to Colbert's speech because he gave it on a Tuesday, and 9/11 was a Tuesday. That would clearly be a specious argument, but it's not even true, if I remember correctly, the Correspondent's Dinner was on a Saturday.

But of course, noting that Colbert used the phrase "regardless of what happened on a Tuesday" and that some MIGHT take this as a veiled illusion to 9/11 doesn't work to ridicule the Right, and so they continue to blatently misrepresent what the woman was actually saying.

Just more proof that it's not just the Right that suffers from the tendency to put debasing their oponents in front of the truth or the good of the nation. And one more reason why I keep writing this blog, because if I can make even just a few more people think a bit more critically about what their pundits (on both sides) are telling them, I will have helped, in a small way, to raise the level of debate and strengthen the country. At least, that's my dream.

Liam.