Saturday 20th of April 2024

whose line is it anyway?...

a fair enough explanation...

Among those cheering loudest at the (presumed) end of Donald Trump’s presidency in the past week were the comedians – Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver – on America’s staggering array of late-night shows and the-week-that-was wraps.

Amid footage of singing, cheering and dancing in the streets, they made no pretence of impartiality, Colbert popping champagne, Oliver sharing a stream of text messages from family and friends saying the same thing: It’s over.

But if this really is the end of Trump, what does it mean for comedy?

There were more than 3100 jokes about Trump on late-night TV in the US in 2017, according to research by Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia. By way of comparison, Bill Clinton inspired around 1700 gags in 1998, the year his sex scandal dominated headlines. Lichter and co-author Stephen Farnsworth reported that this year a staggering 97 per cent of all political jokes on late-night TV were Trump-oriented.


It went well beyond the late-night shows. There were podcasts, stand-up routines, Alec Baldwin’s long-running parody on Saturday Night Live, Sacha Baron Cohen’s revival of Borat, Sarah Cooper’s lip-synch shtick on social media and the Netflix special it spawned. So what now?

Cooper, whose Everything’s Fine shows there is far more to her than an ability to mouth the President’s inane pronouncements, addressed the question on Whoopi Goldberg’s The View this week. "People are like, 'Oh, he’s going to be gone and you’ll be out of a job'. But the thing is, if he’d won, then I would have been out of a job," she said. "These videos wouldn’t be funny anymore. I think they would absolutely have lost their charm if he’d won."

For many comedians, the charm was long gone anyway.

"As a human being and a comedian, I cannot wait for this to be over," John Oliver told The New York Times last month. Rebecca Drysdale, former head writer on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, last week declared her intent to never write another joke about Trump.

"I believe that comedy is a powerful tool. I believe that it can handle anything, no matter how unfunny," she said. "[But] I don’t believe that making fun of this man, doing impressions of him or making him silly, is a good use of that power. It only adds to his."

Comedians have always worked in the belief that satire is a powerful weapon, notes local writer and stand-up Sami Shah, "but when reality is such a farce, then what do you do? It’s so hard to parody someone who does such ridiculous things – you’re always playing catch-up."

 

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/culture/comedy/the-joke-s-on-us-what-happens-to-c...

 

 

 

 

a great idea...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2DgwPG7mAA&list=PLE309EE22AC16CE6E&index=591

 

 

making satire out of Joe Biden would be like killing our own grandfather, the undertaker...

a couple of history lessons...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtgzVARrPu4

 

Here, Donaldelirious Janitorial Trumpinosky explains History from a stand-up comic view point. To some extend, DJT could not get away with his shitty satirical material if was not the PRESIDENT. But the lesson is clear: don't trust the history books.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, as Donald shows his knowledge, Glenn Greenwald sets the other Historical record straight:

 

 

With Biden's New Threats, the Russia Discourse is More Reckless and Dangerous Than Ever

The U.S. media demands inflammatory claims be accepted with no evidence, while hacking behavior routinely engaged in by the U.S. is depicted as aberrational.


To justify Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies for years competed with one another to depict what they called “Russia’s interference in our elections” in the most apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by President Obama — that it is a weak regional power with an economy smaller than Italy’s capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the U.S. — and instead cast Moscow as a grave, even existential, threat to U.S. democracy, with its actions tantamount to the worst security breaches in U.S. history.

This post-2016 mania culminated with prominent liberal politicians and journalists (as well as John McCain) declaring Russia’s activities surrounding the 2016 to be an “act of war” which, many of them insisted, was comparable to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack — the two most traumatic attacks in modern U.S. history which both spawned years of savage and destructive war, among other things.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) repeatedly demanded that Russia’s 2016 “interference” be treated as “an act of war.” Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking as “a cyber 9/11.” And here is Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on MSNBC in early February, 2018, pronouncing Russia “a hostile foreign power” whose 2016 meddling was the “equivalent” of Pearl Harbor, “very much on par” with the “seriousness” of the 1941 attack in Hawaii that helped prompt four years of U.S. involvement in a world war.

With the Democrats, under Joe Biden, just weeks away from assuming control of the White House and the U.S. military and foreign policy that goes along with it, the discourse from them and their media allies about Russia is becoming even more unhinged and dangerous. Moscow’s alleged responsibility for the recently revealed, multi-pronged hack of U.S. Government agencies and various corporate servers is asserted — despite not a shred of evidence, literally, having yet been presented — as not merely proven fact, but as so obviously true that it is off-limits from doubt or questioning. 

Any questioning of this claim will be instantly vilified by the Democrats’ extremely militaristic media spokespeople as virtual treason. “Now the president is not just silent on Russia and the hack. He is deliberately running defense for the Kremlin by contradicting his own Secretary of State on Russian responsibility,” pronounced CNN’s national security reporter Jim Sciutto, who last week depicted Trump’s attempted troop withdrawal from Syria and Germany as “ceding territory” and furnishing “gifts” to Putin. More alarmingly, both the rhetoric to describe the hack and the retaliation being threatened are rapidly spiraling out of control. 

Democrats (along with some Republicans long obsessed with The Russian Threat, such as Mitt Romney) are casting the latest alleged hack by Moscow in the most melodramatic terms possible, ensuring that Biden will enter the White House with tensions sky-high with Russia and facing heavy pressure to retaliate aggressively. Biden’s top national security advisers and now Biden himself have, with no evidence shown to the public, repeatedly threatened aggressive retaliation against the country with the world’s second-largest nuclear stockpile.

Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO) — one of the pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee who earlier this year joined with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to block Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — announced: “this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,” adding: “Our nation is under assault.” The second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin (D-IL), pronounced: “This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia." 

Meanwhile, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has for years been casting Russia as a grave threat to the U.S. while Democrats mocked him as a relic of the Cold War (before they copied and then surpassed him), described the latest hack as “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.” The GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee also blasted Trump for his failure to be “aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action,” though — like virtually every prominent figure demanding tough “retaliation” — Romney failed to specify what he had in mind that would be sufficient retaliation for “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.”

For those keeping track at home: that’s two separate “Pearl Harbors” in less than four years from Moscow (or, if you prefer, one Pearl Harbor and one 9/11). If Democrats actually believe that, it stands to reason that they will be eager to embrace a policy of belligerence and aggression toward Russia. Many of them are demanding this outright, mocking Trump for failing to attack Russia — despite no evidence that they were responsible — while their well-trained liberal flock is suggesting that the non-response constitutes some form of “high treason.”

Indeed, the Biden team has been signalling that they intend to quickly fulfill demands for aggressive retaliation. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Biden “accused President Trump [] of ‘irrational downplaying’” of the hack while “warning Russia that he would not allow the intrusion to ‘go unanswered’ after he takes office.” Biden emphasized that once the intelligence assessment is complete, “we will respond, and probably respond in kind.” 

Threats and retaliation between the U.S. and Russia are always dangerous, but particularly so now. One of the key nuclear arms agreements between the two nuclear-armed nations, the New START treaty, will expire in February unless Putin and Biden can successfully negotiate a renewal: sixteen days after Biden is scheduled to take office. “That will force Mr. Biden to strike a deal to prevent one threat — a nuclear arms race — while simultaneously threatening retaliation on another,” observed the Times.

This escalating rhetoric from Washington about Russia, and the resulting climate of heightened tensions, are dangerous in the extreme. They are also based in numerous myths, deceits and falsehoods:

First, absolutely no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest, let alone prove, that Russia is responsible for these hacks. It goes without saying that it is perfectly plausible that Russia could have done this: it’s the sort of thing that every large power from China and Iran to the U.S. and Russia have the capability to do and wield against virtually every other country including one another.

But if we learned nothing else over the last several decades, we should know that accepting claims that emanate from the U.S. intelligence community about adversaries without a shred of evidence is madness of the highest order. We just had a glaring reminder of the importance of this rule: just weeks before the election, countless mainstream media outlets laundered and endorsed the utterly false claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation,” only for officials to acknowledge once the harm was done that there was no evidence — zero — of Russian involvement.

 

Read more:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/with-bidens-new-threats-the-russia

 

 

Read from top.

 

 

 

laissez-faire fascism...

 

From Glenn Greenwald

 

...

The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.

All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.

 

 

Read more:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarianism-in

 

 

Read from top.

 

(With article like this one, no wonder Glenn Greenwald had to resign from the Intercept, now desperately seeking cash...)

intercept

This is glib and hypocritical from the Intercept that has lost its "soul" — Glenn Greenwald, who is not afraid of spelling F-A-S-C-I-S-M as he sees it, especially coming from "liberalism". But hush hush, we're not supposed to notice...