Your Newest Political Obligation: To Find Stephen Colbert Funny

I'm working on a slow connection, so I'm not going to link to anything, but if you've been slumming around the leftosphere lately you should have noticed that it's ideologically correct to:

(a) Think that Colbert is funny
(b) Think that he was particularlly funny at the Correspondents' Dinner
(c) Think that it's yet another strike against the MSM that they conspired to ignore Colbert's comic genius there

Apparently, anyone who denies any of (a)-(c) loves George W. Bush and wants to have 10,000 of his babies.

My God the left is rife with tedious morons. How do you guys stand this crap? Yes, yes, the right is worse. So what? That in no way means that the left isn't stupid and infuriating. I've often said that the one thing that could make me a conservative some day is the the left.

My reaction to Colbert, in case you're interested (and there's no reason you should be):

I think he's a little funny, but certainly no Jon Stewart. He's a one-trick pony, and the trick's only about a B+ trick to begin with. Now, funniness is a largely (though not entirely) subjective phenomenon, so I'm not universalizing these judgments. But anyway, I read that he killed at the Correspondents' Dinner, and I went to check out the clip. I was ready to be amused. But I didn't even watch the whole thing. It just drug on, I got bored, I navigated away. Not that funny, IMHO.

Then the purges and denunciations began. If you haven't seen Richard Cohen's op-ed on this, you should hunt it up. (I'll forge a link when I'm on a faster connection.) I think sane liberals often forget the danger that's posed by nutty lefties. Every time I try to discuss this, people get bent out of shape and harp on a fact that I'm always careful to acknowledge: the right is worse. And its kooks are in power, whereas our kooks are the fringe. But that doesn't mean that the kooks on our side aren't bad and dumb and dangerous. Even if you aren't anti-kook per se--and you should be--you should worry about our kooks because they are a major force in driving people over to the other side. (Evidence for this abounds, but a good anecdotal account of this can be found in the first few chapters of David Brock's Blinded By the Right.)

This Colbert squabble is minor and stupid...but it tells you something about the character--intellectual and otherwise--of folks like, say, Atrios. It doesn't show them to be thoroughly bad folks, of course, but it does show them to have at least some weird dogmatic tendencies. As Mark Kleiman has noted, Atrios has an inclination to treat people who disagree with him as if they were idiots. This is a tendency he shares with the likes of Limbaugh and Colter. Its a tendency that his commenters often share and encourage. And its the kind of attitude that can do real, long-term harm to individuals and countries.

Somehow this dispute has impinged on the dispute about civility in politics. Disturbingly, it seems to have become fashionable in some parts of the leftosphere to denounce and ridicule those who urge civility in public discourse. It's become a kind of standard joke in some circles. (As in: Lefty 1: "Smith's the kind of person who wants more civility." Lefties 2-n: "Har har har! Asshole.") The idea there seems to be that conservatives have won victories by being vicious, and Bush is bad, ergo we should be vicious, too. Now, I'm willing to listen to reasons in support of such an argument, but its weaknesses should be fairly evident. All I want to note right now is that we should beware of those who embrace such a weak argument with such unreflective relish.