Tag: Rant of the Week

Stephen Colbert hosted his last “The Colbert Report” on December 18. His first “The Word” was “Truthiness” which in 2006 became Merriam Webster’s “Word of the Year.”

As expected, there were a few surprises in store for us as we pored through your submissions for our first Word of the Year online survey. Either the vast majority of you out there in the Merriam-Webster online community are big fans of The Colbert Report, or Time Magazine was right on target when it honored the show’s host Stephen Colbert earlier this year as one of the most influential people of 2006. By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority vote, our visitors have awarded top honors to a word Colbert first introduced on “The Word” segment of his debut broadcast on Comedy Central back in October 2005. Soon after, this word was chosen as the 16th annual Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, and defined by them as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”

Beauty Is Truthiness, Truthiness Beauty …

… that is all ye know on earth, and if ye need to know anything else, Stephen Colbert, 42, will tell ye what to think. On Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report (silent t, both words), he plays a vain, blustery political pundit, and neither politics nor punditry emerges unscathed. In the first episode, he coined the term truthiness to embody his belief that facts are far less important than what you want to be true. “You don’t look up truthiness in a book,” he declared. “You look it up in your gut.”

Truthiness resonated beyond Colbert’s satire in an era of phony memoirs and reality TV. And to people who feel the Administration chooses gut (and spin) over facts, his acerbic speech “praising” the President at the White House correspondents’ dinner became pop legend. Citing Bush’s cratering job-approval rating, the in-character Colbert argued, “Does that not also logically mean that 68% of Americans approve of the job he’s not doing?” Whatever you’re doing, or not doing, Mr. Colbert, keep it up.

So to honor Stephen’s departure from Comedy Central and the end of “The Colbert Report”, our “Rant of the Week” presents his first and last words.

“The moral universe is not zero sum.” Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC’s All In, gets it.

   “Now the appropriate response to this new what-aboutism is twofold. First, as a basic matter of both moral law and principle, killing enemies in combat is sometimes permissible. Torturing them, however, never is. The prohibition on torture is categorical.

   In the American justice system, for example, you can sentence someone to death — though obviously I oppose that. You cannot sentence them to be tortured because torture occupies a special category of moral taboo.

   The second response to these latter-day what-aboutists is more or less the same one I would suggest we give the Soviets. It’s true. Many aspects of this government’s targeted killing program — maybe the entire thing — are morally odious and constitutionally suspect. They deserve criticism — heck, they even deserve outrage, though I would note the people who devote outrage to them tend to be the people who devote outrage toward torture, like ACLU and Amnesty International, and not Fox News.

   But that has no bearing whatsoever on whether it’s okay to pour water down someone’s nose until they foam at the mouth, to threaten to sexually abuse someone’s mother, or to anally rape someone with a feeding tube.

   And only a moral idiot would fail to see that.

(emhasis mine)

h/t karoli at Crooks and Liars for the partial transcript and this thought about what Chris’s “wisdom”:

Well, maybe he did include Scarborough in that rant through the back door. Because it’s obvious to anyone watching that Joe is indeed a moral idiot.

In his editorial New Rule, Bill Maher tears into Kansas Governor Sam Brownbeck and the Republican “Zombie Lie” of trickle-down economics, as well as voters who allow themselves to be distracted by faux scandals.

Florida’s gubernatorial race heats up as Governor Rick Scott shows up late to a debate where Democratic candidate Charlie Crist is using a fan to strategically cool his balls

Fan Delays Florida Debate, and Mocking Circulates Online

By Lizette Alvarez, The New York Times

Clinging to caricature, Florida has once again stumbled into political farce. This time by way of a fan, a small black Vornado Air Circulator tucked discreetly – some said improperly – beneath former Gov. Charlie Crist’s lectern during Wednesday’s high-stakes governor’s race debate.

The fan delayed Gov. Rick Scott from taking the stage for seven minutes, in protest of an apparent rule violation. And it led to an almost immediate flurry of social media lampooning, helped along by Mr. Crist who asked, “Are we really going to debate a fan?” [..]

By Thursday, #Fangate, as it was christened on Twitter, had devolved into a predictable campaign montage of finger-pointing, backpedaling, face-saving and, finally, money-raising. That’s because the fan kerfuffle, while seemingly trivial, breezed into the middle of a neck-and-neck race between Mr. Scott and Mr. Crist.

Joe Biden Apologizes for Telling the Truth

By Carol Giacomo

It used to be that lying got politicians into trouble. For Vice President Joe Biden, it’s truth-telling that causes a stir.

The latest furor started after he spoke at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government last Thursday. Mr. Biden said American allies including Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had extended unconditional financial and logistical support to Sunni fighters trying to oust the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. [..]

There is little doubt that his basic facts are accurate, confirmed by news reports in The Times and other media and by Western officials. Yet Mr. Biden was forced to officially apologize to Turkey late Saturday after Mr. Erdogan demanded it. He issued another apology on Sunday after the United Arab Emirates also took umbrage. [..]

In the current instance, Mr. Biden should have exercised some restraint and not publicly shared his conversation with President Erdogan. But the basic truth – that Turkey and other countries enabled Islamic State and other extremists – can’t be wished away. The United States, Turkey, Qatar, the U.A.E. and other countries in the region have a mutual need to work together to counter ISIS or ISIL. That means owning up to the mistakes that have allowed the group to flourish and correcting them, including shutting down Turkey as a transit corridor for ISIS revenue, weapons and foreign fighters.