OK, one reason Your Humble Blogger gets all confused is that it’s so difficult to tell the real phony journalists from the phony real journalists. Not that Bill O’Reilly is a journalist these days, I understand. He’s a ... somethin’.
Well, and can you tell if this quote is real or fake?
There is no reason on this earth that all of us cannot celebrate a public holiday devoted to generosity, peace, and love together. There is no reason on the earth that we can't do that. So we are going to do it. And anyone who tries to stop us from doing it is gonna face me.Yep, according to Media Matters, it’s a real quote. Oh, they have an audio clip (to which I have not listened), but of course that could be faked, too. I suspect Harry Shearer does a fine Bill O’Reilly. The thing is, if Harry Shearer ended an O’Reilly bit with the “gonna face me” line, I would consider it heavy-handed and overdone. I mean, that’s the joke, isn’t it? That ve haf vays of making you tchoyfull?
I never had much sympathy with the Tom Lehrer view that after Watergate there wasn’t much point in satire (which, for all I know, he never actually said). But maybe I have a little sympathy with whoever does SNL or similar; in order to exaggerate this stuff for comic effect, you pretty much have to go into bad-taste territory and have Sekrit CIA prisons in Bethlehem where secularists are waterboarded until they wish you a merry Christmas. Anything less than that, and they’ll pass you standing between the writing and the performing—even if you do improv.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
(there’s probably a more elegant way to state this, but not before 8:30 am local time):
I can’t seem to confirm Watergate as the, er, watershed for satire, but the BBC claims that Lehrer said that when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, satire died:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/feature_kissinger_profile.shtml