Aren’t you conflating Colbert with a soulless, generic anchorman?
This is fucken Colbert we’re talking about here. Pretty sure the appropriate reaction is WTF.
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Yet, despite his serial upcockery, we kept allowing Jeffrey Archer back into our lives. Must’ve been the literature.
Having just watched the whole intro, I wouldn’t say it’s anywhere near the same level as Fallon’s tousling. but geez, it’s a bit weird.
WTF is Spicer even doing there? Why would he do it? Why would they even think to ask him instead of using McCarthy?
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That tweet is really odd. Erwin Rommel was almost as ethical as von Thoma (Rommel was forced to commit suicide by Hitler, but von Thoma decided that Hitler was mad and surrendered to Montgomery.)
I am becoming disappointed at all this citing of Nazis. Where we are now is the English speaking world in 2017. “Othering” Trumpists and Bannonites by calling them Nazis (which, mea culpa, I have done myself in the past) is not helping in my view, any more than calling them “Neanderthals” or “Cave dwellers”. It’s deflection from admitting that this is what part of our own society has become as a result of choices we have made in electing politicians, reading and viewing media, and listening to propaganda.
Auden wrote “Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offence from Luther until now that has driven a culture mad”. He’s hinting there that Protestantism may be a factor and from what I remember of theology, he may well have a point. Protestantism encourages nationalism, exclusion and othering in a way that Catholicism since the counter-Reformation usually doesn’t. But, continuing Auden, we need to ask “What huge imago made a psychopathic god.”
Spicer may be despicable. Colbert may be despicable for playing along with him. But in the light of burning buildings in Yemen and West Mosul, the support for a far-right government in Israel, the almost casual shooting of black men and women, the apparent provocation of war on the Korean peninsula, and the creation of asset bubbles that extract money from mostly poor people, it’s pretty small stuff. It’s like being in a room full of poison gas shells and complaining about the colour of the hazard labels.
(rant over for now)
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There were rumours a couple of months back he might become the US Ambassador to Ireland. I believe the initialism that goes here is
FFS
Extremely appropriate if you know anything about Irish politics. There is a reason why Northern politicians who dug with both feet referred to “that banana republic down south”. This was the country, after all, which had a PM at one time, quite recently, who had no bank account - but had literally paper sacks of money in his house that he had “won at the races”.
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It’s possible to laugh at this joke and still think Spicer is an asshole.
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I think this falls under the category: “It SEEMED like a good idea, at the time.”
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It seems the rest of the media world says “Hard Pass!”
"…none of the networks were interested in hiring Spicer due to a “lack of credibility.”
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Well, no.
That’s because a press spokesman is not in fact in any way like a lawyer.
They are a mouthpiece, no more. They are not required to have any ethics or any requirement to believe that what they say is true.
Trump says his crowd is the biggest there’s ever been and wants to tell the press that; the spokesman’s job is to go and say that.
A good press spokesman manages to do it in a way that almost makes you believe it.
Spicer was so entertainingly bad at it that if it wasn’t for the incompetence of everyone else Trump chose for any position, you could think he was doing it deliberately.
Happily for him and Trump, it turns out that it doesn’t matter in the US because you can say whatever you like and some portions of the media will say “Yes, of course, you’re so right”.
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“Yes, I spent six months actively lying to the public for criminals and pretended to believe those lies even though they had terrible real-world consequences for people in our own country and across the globe—but I had no choice! You see, they paid me to do it!”
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The point I’m trying to make is that regardless of what you and I think of his morals and ethics, he did not have “a professional responsibility” to not mislead the public or indeed do or not do anything.
He is not a member of a profession. He has no professional obligations.
He is a political mouthpiece. Everything he says is and should be considered propaganda pure and simple.
Decry him for being prepared to promote lies by all means. That makes him a terrible human being but not ‘unprofessional’.
That may seem pedantic but every time someone tries to apply professional standards to people who don’t have them, it undermines the whole point of professionalism which is that people are reasonably confident that they can expect and will actually get certain minimum standards of skill and ethical behaviour.
Since being in a profession costs me significant amounts each year, I’m keen to hang on to any benefit it might grant!
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I think he actually believes that, since they weren’t HIS lies, they weren’t HIS ideas, he didn’t really tell a lie. He simply repeated a lie someone else told.
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