A newly released Reuters online poll places left-wing court jesters Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert atop "the peak of American punditry."
While this will presumably come as welcome news for Stewart and Colbert, since the poll puts them ahead of pre-eminent conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, it also reveals an unfortunate aspect of contemporary liberalism.
Limbaugh made this point to his radio listeners Tuesday while talking about an exchange between O'Reilly and Juan Williams, a liberal Fox News political analyst (audio) --
LIMBAUGH: You know, I gotta play this Juan Williams sound bite. I don't even know what he's saying here, 'cause I'm really not sure what the question is, I didn't see the show, so let me see if I can put this together, because I think it dovetails with what I talked about moments ago about, you know, everybody wants us to have these conversations (about race), the Attorney General calls us cowards if we don't, then when we engage in conversations about things they want us to talk about, i.e., race. The minute that happens, they shut it down, call you racist or a bigot or whatever if you don't say what they want to hear. So with that in mind, O'Reilly, in talking about the Pam Geller cartoon contest shooting, says to his guest Juan Williams, the liberal fallback position is, oh the right does it too. The right does not have access to the New York Times or the LA Times or Yahoo or Google, O'Reilly points out. They don't! It's the left that pours this crap in. Now here's Williams' response --
WILLIAMS: What we're going through here in the country is, it's difficult to have an honest discussion where people listen to each other. If people get on Rush Limbaugh, if they're on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, if they are on a lot of these blogs and right-wing sites, they are all talking to each other, and guess what, they are making fun of the left and mocking the left.
LIMBAUGH: OK now, look, I'm sorry, I don't know what that answer has to do with O'Reilly's question, but it doesn't matter because it serves its purpose as a stand-alone. Juan Williams starts out by worrying that we don't listen to each other, we don't listen to each other. So if a caller, like one of you in this audience, you get on this program or somebody writes an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, they end up just saying what everybody else in the group thinks, there's no difference, there's no variance, and they start making fun of liberals, and they start mocking the left.
You know, I sit here in amused wonderment over this. You know, liberalism is nothing more than comedy today. Liberals' most respected public figures are comedians -- did you know that? According to a recent Reuters online poll, the most respected liberal public figures are comedians and actors. Other than Obama, of course, he's at the top there 'cause he's president, the president always wins in these things. The people like Letterman and Colbert and Stewart, they're all at the top of the most respected, most admired, most trusted list. They're comedians and what do they do? Mock, make fun of, laugh, distort, lie about, you name it.
As shown by another boffo performance at the White House correspondents' dinner, Obama risks being remembered as more adept at stand-up than as chief executive. How strange indeed considering that his most ardent apologists are also utterly humorless.
