Things I Learned in November
This past November, we insisted on perfection. Our Republican congressional majority was uninspiring, venal, and off-message; plus, Ted Haggard banged a gay prostitute. So many of us stayed home. And now we have a Democratic majority that is uninspiring, venal, and way off-message, and is also trying to lose the war as fast as it can. We can't influence them, we can't rally them. We're no better off. (Ted Haggard's straight, though.)
We could have corrected this in the primaries, but we didn't. So we should have gone to war with the army we had, but we decided they weren't good enough. We're no better off.
I'm learning from this. It doesn't look like my dream team is going to get drafted for the Republican '08 ticket:
What am I going to do with all these T-shirts?
But I'm not bitter. I'm not gonna stay home and cry into my beer because the John-John slate didn't materialize. There are a few credible, though imperfect, candidates out there and I'm gonna eventually get behind one of them. Unless somebody better comes along. Right now, that's the army we have.
Now a "conservative comedy show" comes on the TV. Previews, and now clips of the first show, suggest it is...not exactly P.J. O'Rourke-level funny. It's not as bad as I feared, though, and I'm officially tired of the rants of "It's a wretched abortion! Get it off the air now! Bury it in the Nevada desert like a mob witness full of nuclear waste!"
Yeah, the liberals will laugh at us. They do that anyway. it's their job. Even if the show was consistently Airplane! funny and Bill-Buckley smart, they would trash it. So I don't give a sloppy wet kiss what they say about this show on, say, Olbermann. He and the other lefty bumblejockeys don't cross my radar. The minute I or anyone starts making any political or programming decisions based on what liberal TV comics might say...well, that's when you hand over your man card. Seriously. You can watch them, but care what they say? Wiener. As for me, I'm not gonna watch them, just like I'm not gonna watch the Half-hour-news-hour.
Oh, if it's on in a hotel room, I might not change the channel. But if they vanish or if they hang on, it's no skin off my nose.
That said, I wish them the best. I hope they can the laff-track (or perhaps insist on a non-orangutan studio audience) and get some better writers, and actually pick up a decent market share. Even if I won't be watching, I'm just glad to hear someone out there in TV land is going to be throwing punches for our side now and then, feeble and telegraphed though they might be. A few of them might even land. Hey, imagine if they manage just to squeeze out one Palomino! level piece that goes viral every month. That's something, right? And no, I'm not calling on you to SUPPORT THIS SHOW!!! like you were writing your congressman or something. I don't care whether you watch it or not either.
But consider this. If the .5HNH does marginally well, somewhere some funny conservative guy is going to sit down over Bellinis with a rival network executive and point that fact out, and then say he knows how that demographic and then some--maybe a little younger and hipper--could be owned by this rival network. And then he'll take out a proposal for a rival show, and explain that it's like the .5HNH...except actually funny.
So if .5HNH takes off, it will show there's an audience for this kind of humor. Hell, if .5HNH takes off, I think it proves there's an audience desperate for this kind of humor. So let's stop wishing for it to fail, because in the TV conservative comedy game, it's the army we have. (It and Gutfeld's Redeye, that is.) Until we can build a better one.
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Well-informed, if immoderate opposing views can be found here.