Discussion for article #235801
It’s kind of scary, really. There’s this play called King Lear where the only character with the wit and nerve to say how things really are, the only person with license to tell the king what he’s done wrong, is the Fool—the comedian, we’d call it today. The play does not end well.
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There are exactly two words that explain why dense Wolf Blitzer doesn’t look like the most stupid person at CNN:
#1 Don
#2 Lemon
And that is perhaps why doltish Lemon is allowed to hang around!
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If it bleeds it leads. By definition peaceful protests don’t involve much blood. Worse, the day to day work of improving conditions in American cities is hard and generally unglamorous in the best of circumstances and hard unglamorous work seems to be beyond our politicians who are only interested in making the evening news. It has been said that the very act of observing can change reality. Maybe if Wolf Blitzer started observing the day to day struggles of men and women trapped in low pay, low skill jobs their reality would change for the better. Nah, can’t happen. Only blood sells detergent.
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The Fool is a standard literary device made use of heavily throughout the Elizabethan Era and beyond. The concept shows up in the modern era in the Discworld novels by the late Terry Pratchett.
Jon Stewart has been filling this role for decades now.
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Don’t blame Wolf. Blame the teleprompter.
Fox = Right. MSNBC = Left. CNN = Dumb.
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A lot of them got schooled yesterday.
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Not familiar with Pratchett but I was an English major a while back. It’s kind of amazing how closely the role Stewart plays fits the Shakespeare fools. And I doubt it’s an accident.
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Terry Pratchett was the most read British author until J.K. Rowlings came around…and his satirical Discworld series is quite good.
And the satirist has always acted as someone who is suppose to expose the way the world really is, often for humorous effect, the way the Fool would or Stewart does 
I studied satire while working on my MFA in Creative Writing.
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I would say that Fox = pandering to the rich and stupid rather than Right. Those I respect on the right would never watch Fox.
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No, they didn’t. But anyone who was listening and wanted to understand should have gotten the message.
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Maybe when the source of the video makes it autoplay, TPM could post a link to the video rather than the video itself. I’d hate to miss good video because of a bad policy by it’s creator, but I’d also object if every time I load a page with a video it started yammering before I could read the story that introduces it.
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Wolf Blitzer is a bearded goldfish.
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CNN sucks - we all know that - but Wolf Blitzer sucks even more.
Tired over paid Wolf Blitzer needs to go back to his 24x7 search for missing Airasia flight 8501.
Wolf is expert at doing the same sound bites over and over and over again - I’m surprised he’s not a Republican candidate running for President!
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MSNBC = Left. I keep hearing this assertion. Wish I could figure out why.
Well, of course Blitzer reacted this way…he was in a near panic. Baltimore is in the same state as his house!! (He lives in Bethesda). That’s practically next door!!
He really should change his name to Fraid E. Cat.
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“It’s something I didn’t think we’d be seeing again.”
MSM Rosetta Stone: “I thought we finally had those niggers under control again and that they’d finally learned their place…”
It should actually be: Fox=pure right-wing propaganda bordering on delusion; MSNBC=dumb; CNN=dumber.
I think much of the MSNBC=left has a lot to do with their poor ratings and conservatives seizing on that by painting MSNBC as some sort of equivalent to Fox News, but for those on the left. From there it somehow - through magic and a gross misunderstanding of why cable news ratings aren’t a viable metric to gauge a nation’s ideology and a total lack in comprehending that there are multiple sources of information beyond those two networks - means that the country is somehow completely on board with Hannity et al. There is a left lean to some of their pundits though (Matthews, Maddow), but nothing on the level of their right-wing counterpart in terms of overt bias and flat out bullshit.
I actually wish MSNBC would die out, so conservatives would stop pretending like even liberals care to watch it.
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Yeah, it doesn’t end well for most of them…but it’s totally unclear what happens to the Fool in the end.
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