Remember the movie "Say Anything"? Same can be said for Cenk Uygur's approach to criticizing Republicans.
Chatting with his MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow on her show Friday night, Uygur apparently forgot he was on the air and described President Obama's opponents in a way one might expect if the audience consisted solely of liberals. (Then again, it was MSNBC).
Here's what Uygur told Maddow about Republican efforts to retool Medicare before it spends itself broke, followed by his overwrought description of Obama's "enemies" (video below page break) --
I think that they're incredibly wrong, the polls show how wrong they are, I think the election in the 26th district showed how wrong they are, and I think that they might, you know, be handing Barack Obama and other Democrats an enormous gift in 2012, if the Democrats, of course, are willing to accept that gift. And I, Barack Obama has the great advantage of having the worst, most clownish enemies of all time.
Wow -- "the worst" and "the most clownish enemies" -- "of all time" to boot. Not a combo one sees often, especially once the entirety of time is brought into the mix. Reminds me of that old "Saturday Night Live" commercial for a product called Shimmer -- a floor wax and a dessert topping. ("Tastes great ... and just look at that shine!").
From Uygur's pre-adolescent worldview, Obama's enemies are worse than the architects of the Final Solution, worse than Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, worse than slave-traders and those who owned other human beings as property, worse than the countless sadists who lived for no purpose but to inflict pain, worse than the men who crucified Jesus Christ.
But they are also the "most clownish enemies of all time," at least as Uygur sees them -- which pretty much eliminates the aforementioned villains, all of whom were deadly serious about their business.
This nonsensical criticism says nothing about Obama's "enemies," nothing coherent anyway, but plenty about the person saying it. That he, for example, sees the world through cartoonish lenses and can be expected to work at a media outlet that shares this perspective.
