Irrelevance Glorified

Recently, both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show featured consumers who successfully took legal action against big banks when they were threatened with foreclosure. In one case, the couple didn’t have a loan with the bank in question, and they owned their house outright! I found it interesting that both shows found different people to interview, and took such different approaches to the subject. As one might expect, Stephen Colbert’s approach is a bit more absurd.

If you’re not familiar with Fox News personality Glenn Beck….well, then, good, actually. He is a conservative commentator who used to have a show where he would feverishly describe his conspiracy theories and lament the (imaginary) decline of the United States, usually due to something that libruls did. One of his greatest schticks is using multiple chalkboards to draw together the disparate strands of his theories, usually ending up with something like “Nancy Pelosi is brainwashing young children as sleeper agents for the Chinese Communist party in an attempt to overthrow the United States, and in effect, Christianity. I’m not gonna even post of the videos; I’ll just link to a Google search so you can look at the screenshots and marvel.

Anyways, John Stewart started making EPIC parodies of the rants-with-chalkboard-drawings, the first one back in March. He brought it back one last time after Beck announced he would be ending his show in April, and just in case you haven’t seen them, I thought I would post the videos. Better late than never, I guess.

I recently realized that I had a severe backlog of Daily Show videos to get through, over a month. Well, I buckled down one weekend when I had to do other computer work, and watched a bunch at a time. There were a number of good ones, but only a few that really had the level of sarcasm that I was looking for. I have found that John Oliver is really the best for this sort of thing; I think it helps that he’s British.

First up, a visit to an RNC meeting in Hawaii to discuss fiscal responsibility.

That video is good, but I don’t necessarily think that its all that hypocritical to have a summit on fiscal responsibility in Hawaii. Maybe they got really good group rates.

However, this next clip is delicious.

When delivering their distinct brand of satire, the folks at The Daily Show make heavy use of sarcasm, with devastating results. These two clips were from the January 5th show, and they are fantastic.

Once again, Brian Williams was a guest on Daily Show this week. I smiled when I saw the guest list on The Daily Show website, expecting Brian and John to do some verbal sparring and perhaps inadvertently getting some real news info as well. At least in my opinion, they did not disappoint.

If you need back story on what they’re talking about, you can watch this Daily Show clip or read on. Mark Sanford (Governor, SC) recently had a little bit of a scandal when he disappeared from the state for a few days. His office said that he does this from time to time, and he was ‘hiking the Appalachian Trail.’ Of course, it turns out that he wasn’t hiking, he was traveling to Argentina to see his mistress. Seriously. Although I’ll add the caveat that he went to South America to break it off. Anyways, before it broke that he had left the country, a number of media outlets e-mailed the Governor’s office offering easy interviews in exchange for exclusive interviews, and a number of them talked about how they would push back against the liberal media’s attempt at a fake scandal.

Okay, I admit it…I just love it when Jon Stewart swears.

This is from over a month ago, but it’s still funny.

The tag line : “Republicans debate the stimulus bill, forgetting that C-SPAN doesn’t destroy old tapes when a new administration steps in.” And a bonus — more monkey paw!!