Sunday, June 14, 2009

Ya See, Conservatives are Funny

There’s nothing funny about Barack Obama, we’re told. But conservatives? That’s another story. Just ask David Letterman.  Or Anderson Cooper. Cooper has discovered a nifty workaround for that pesky “objective journalist” thing—photo caption contests.

Photo caption contests that belittle Republicans, of course.

Every night, Cooper runs a Beat 360 segment designed to get yucks by running the winning entries in a photo caption tie-in to his show’s blog. More often than not, he gets a good dig in at a Republican politician, furthering some nugget of conventional wisdom. One might even think the caption contest judges were looking to belittle Republicans.

Here’s a recap of this week’s Beat 360s:

I know, I know: Lighten up, Hynes.  These are jokes.  Besides the vitriol spouted at Republican politicians by the gang at MSNBC is far worse. 
But is it? I’m not sure.

To begin with, Cooper has a lot more mainstream credibility than MSNBC’s broadcast team … even after that awkward “teabagging” debacle. So digs from Cooper mean more than digs from, say, Rachel Maddow.

But there’s another problem. I had a conversation with a conservative in Hollywood the other day and he was lamenting over the Left’s successful campaign to make Republicans look weird and almost from another planet, culturally speaking. He was right … the joke, as told by Letterman, Cooper, and just about everyone else who has a TV show, is on Republicans.

I’m not looking for Beat 360 affirmative action but when a still shot of Barack Obama and his advisors staring at a laptop turns into a Dick-Cheney-is-fat-and-paranoid joke, you know things are a tad skewed. 

Tips? Nuggets?  E-mail me at patjhynes-AT-gmail.com

Topics: anderson-cooper, palin, conservatives, humor