Reply #2: Comedians and their audiences are lazy [View All]

[jdsmith]

Even a fairly bright person like Letterman (and his writers) will settle for the memes: Gore's a liar, Clinton would rather get laid than govern, Bush is a dope. But this kind of mindless comedy does nothing but congratulate an audience on being smart or hip enough to recognize cliches--a REAL danger given not only the active negatuve rhetorical campaign of Gore = liar, but perhaps more perniciously when the comedians get us to lower our expectations of Bush by telling us constantly what a dunce he is (and not what political genius lies behind pretending to be a doofus).