I heard this bullshit driving to the conference today:
James Lipton, host of “Inside the Actors Studio,” spoke to Laura Ingraham had some interesting thoughts on the elocution skills of Mitt Romney and President Obama.
On Romney: “He has a problem with the laugh. You know what the laugh sounds like Laura?… That HA HA HA in cartoons, he expects us to be amused but if you look at him and freeze the frame at the bottom of the screen and look at his eyes, he clearly is not amused. He needs to fix that. He wants to be amused but he himself is not amused. People think that crying is the test of an actor. The real test of acting is laughing.”
On Obama: “I wanted to write a piece sometime ago, myself once again called the disappearing G. It was inspired by George W. Bush. Where suddenly this man who comes from a good upper-class family and comes from an upper-class world. The G in I-N-G vanished… And other politicians have taken it on. Obama does it there, I don’t like it anywhere. For a fella who’s been educated his whole life he doesn’t need to say we’re gonna succeed.”
Pro-tip for talk show hacks: if you do a show that mostly hippies watch, stay the fuck off winger radio.
Maude
Gonna is used often and I can’t even speak to this.
That guy needs a hobby.
I was waiting for someone there to say something stupid.
Warren Terra
I seem to recall that Lipton has been a Winger-fellating old fart for some time now. He hangs out with Hollywood types, so people assume he’s liberal, but really he’s just another smug rich guy looking for his enormous self-regard to be validated.
kc
Did he use “fella” ironically?
Valdivia
Halperin is already trying very hard for the troll of the year award.
CW in LA
Will Ms. Ingraham promise that, if the president’s elocution were perfect (and it’s already better than most people’s), she wouldn’t call him an Ivy-League elitist?
I think I know the answer to that one.
EDIT: Oh, wait, we’re talking about the dude who’s named, apparently appropriately, for tea bags? Well, same goes.
Baud
DAMN YOU, OBAMA! WHY CAN’T YOU TALK LIKE THE ELITIST WE ACCUSE YOU OF BEING?
ETA: And CW in LA beat me to it.
Culture of Truth
I’m an Obot, but Obama’s has been droppin’ his g’s lately.
Sal
James is disconnected from everything ,he is like MJ telling people he only wants to sleep with the kiddies.
StringonaStick
If this is bothering Lipton all that much, I have to wonder how the hell he got through the Dubya years.
Litlebritdifrnt
@kc:
I was going to say shouldn’t that be “fellow”?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
That fella shouldn’t say gonna? Okay.
no, no he didn’t. And I don’t think what he said about Romney really falls under the heading of “elocution”, but I’m also not sure I’ve heard “elocution” used outside of a three stooges skit involving their version of Margaret Dumont. I think it was about the guys in drag, hiding from mobsters in a finishing school.
some stuff to chew on right there, ain’t there, doncha think?
Ripley
Scrumtrulescent!
SteveM
Thank you. When Lipton did this riff on Romney on his own show, it was being linked all over the lefty ‘sphere (including BJ?) as if it was side-splittingly hilarious and the secret weapon that would win Obama 49 states. I felt there was something wrong with me because I didn’t think it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen.
Tokyokie
Well, he is right about Romney’s soulless laugh.
Amir Khalid
I’ve heard Obama speak, and I don’t hear anything in his way of speech that seems unnatural or affected. I do know that plenty of well-educated Americans — even university professors! — slip into informal speech patterns common in social groups they belong to, just like educated people anywhere. I’m not an academician so I’ve never been to any faculty meetings, but I imagine they do that even there.
No way George Walker Bush was the first ever president to drop his final Gs. I bet LBJ did plenty of that too. In fact, the practice must go as far back with presidents as it does with other Americans. It’s absurd to call it a recent affectation.
balconesfault
Just sayin … anyone who shows up on Ingraham’s show and doesn’t end up in a heated argument is a right wing flack or a pandering hack.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
I agree. Even having this discussion seems a little dirty to me — like we’re contributing to the problem with our discourse.
You want unnatural, look at a video of Romney in blue jeans…
Keith
And when Romney says “Who let the dogs out?” he actually sounds pissed off that someone let dogs go free. He needs to fix that.
Steve
Obama is a politician, give me a break. Although having said that, if he was consciously altering his speech patterns to be more appealing to Everyman, would he really pronounce Pakistan, Indonesia, et al. the way he does?
Baud
@Keith: LOL. You win!
CW in LA
@Keith: Of course he’s pissed. Do you know how much work it is to get those things into their kennels and strap them them to the roof of his car?
burnspbesq
Why does anyone care about this nonsense?
David Koch
@Valdivia:
/Fixed
Jonny Scrum-half
I don’t like how Obama always uses the word “folks,” as in “folks are having a hard time now.” But it’s not a big deal — he’s a politician, as Steve pointed out.
But I don’t thinnk what Lipton said was wrong, either.
Valdivia
@David Koch:
you win. That was much better than mine. :)
Elizabelle
Charlie Pierce is datelining from Providence.
I urge you and mistermix to waylay the gentleman and get him here to interact with us.
Promise him a Tunch apron or some fine Scotch.
Anything.
Just get him here.
OK tkx bai.
Violet
He may be a pretentious douche, but he’s right that there’s something wrong with Romney’s eyes. They don’t match what he’s saying. I noticed it during the debates, and even went so far as to use my hand to cover either the top or bottom half of his face while he talked as I tried to figure out what was bothering me so much about it.
Romney’s eyes don’t match what the rest of his face is doing and it comes across like he’s lying. I wonder how he’ll do during the debates with Obama. That kind of thing is subtle but people pick up on it, even if they can’t explain it.
Litlebritdifrnt
I took elocution lessons (or more correctly “voice training”) when I was in the Royal Navy in order to rid myself of my very thick, and sometimes incomprehensible Lancastrian accent (my voice coach was the voice coach from “The Killing Fields”). I now have a standard BBC accent (as we call it) but I can easily slip back into my Lanky twang when it suits me (and to be honest when I am hanging around with my sister and her family it just happens naturally, also when I am drunk or tired).
By the same token I can turn the “proper” voice up to 11 if needed, which I find particularly useful when trying to get anything done at Camp Lejeune. I called the Legal Department over there once asking for a favor and the Corporal who answered the phone went to get the Lieutenant I needed to speak to and put the handset down rather than put it on hold and said as he walked away from the phone “God that woman’s voice gives me a hard on”.
I saw an article a couple of days ago that basically stated that people in America think that people in Britain are smarter than they are simply because of the accent. I can confirm that proposition.
Amir Khalid
@SteveM:
I didn’t think it was all that funny either, or that Lipton even meant it to be comedy. It was a straightforward and accurate observation, so I thought, of Mitt’s manner of speech. But since the left blogosphere took to promoting it, maybe Lipton felt his public semblance of political neutrality had been compromised. And that he needed to make up some criticism of Obama, however feeble, to restore balance in The Force.
Keith G
Oh great. More outrage about the most insignificant of things. Or is this parody?
I can’t remember the last time I heard about Lipton or Ingraham. I guess we have turned our sights on really small topics.
Well, at least it’s not about totebaggers.
blahblah
Who the hell are you to tell Lipton where he can and can’t do interviews? Laura Ingraham is a shill, but it’s not like Lipton is a political figure.
Go have a drink for fuck’s sake.
Steve
@Litlebritdifrnt: The British accent adds 20 IQ points. None of my British friends can fathom why every American thinks Tony Blair is so smart, but that’s definitely why.
David Koch
Proof!
Smokin gun!
Droppin his gees proves Obama is worst than Bush!
OzoneR
Clearly, if Obama had used the bully pulpit, they wouldn’t be talking about how awful he speaks.
Joseph Nobles
Speaking of fucking no-talent pretentious douches, Polititroll just put claims about their Truth-O-Meter to the Truth-O-Meter and proclaimed them False and Pants On Fire.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Steve:
It is weird, people automatically think you are smart, although I am not sure anyone with a regional accent (like mine was) would garner the same respect. I also get absolutely stellar service in restaurants because the staff automatically assume that I personally know the Royal Family or something.
Linda Featheringill
@Amir Khalid:
And I would bet money that Andrew Jackson dropped g’s, too. Of course, I don’t know how I’d prove that.
cat48
Know who else is saying “Pahkistan” now?? Marco Rubio
National Review berated Obama for his pronunciation. Wonder if they’ll berate Rubio, their Star?? Dan Amira at NYMag has the videos that show Rubio’s transformation.
Amir Khalid
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Even among the English, I’ve heard, there’s a class hierarchy with regional accents; that strong regional accents, particularly from the north, place the speaker as lower-class, whereas the BBC accent hews closer to the speech of the aristocracy. (Do they still call it “received pronunciation”?)
David Koch
That’s no way to speak to Cole
jl
After G Dub, I do not see how anyone can criticize Obama, or Romney, or pretty much any other politician in the spotlight today, on grounds of pronunciation and elocution.
And we have had a few presidents who talked weird. Dub was not the worst, just the most recent. Probably seems the worst because of the likelihood that his odd talkening signaliated some, heh heh, some significantized decidering issues in his noggin’.
Violet
@Litlebritdifrnt:
I guess it depends how pronounced the regional accent is. I can confirm that a northern accent (Mancunian) works wonders in restaurants. And do women still swoon over a Geordie accent?
CW in LA
@Violet: “Romney’s eyes don’t match what the rest of his face is doing and it comes across like he’s lying.”
Well, he does lie a lot. To a Palinesque degree, even, without the alleged folksiness.
schrodinger's cat
@Litlebritdifrnt: Well, that has been my working hypothesis of Sully’s popularity. How do you think he would have fared if he had not immigrated here?
Bloix
I represent English clients. Some of them have posh accents, some of them sound like they were born in a gutter in Shoreditch. Took me a while to realize that the accent was no indication of the person’s intelligence. In fact, there’s something pathetic about a stupid statement coming out in the orotund tones of the Received Pronunciation.
As for Obama, I don’t like the dropped g’s either.
Complaints about dropped g’s have been around for a while now, and not only in reference to Obama. Here’s Peggy Noonan in 2008:
“More than ever on the campaign trail, the candidates are dropping their G’s. Hardworkin’ families are strainin’ and tryin’a get ahead. It’s not only Sarah Palin but Mr. McCain, too, occasionally Mr. Obama, and, of course, George W. Bush when he darts out like the bird in a cuckoo clock to tell us we are in crisis. ”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122419210832542317.html
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Violet:
Someone on MSNBC noticed the same thing, that his eyes/upper face are not in sync with his mouth/lower face. You’re right, it comes across as insincere, deceptive and lying. Rmoney is used to getting his way and he doesn’t like kowtowing to anyone to get what he wants. He looks like he’s eating a shit sandwich and anticipating a top notch dessert for doing so. IOW, he’s only doing this to get what he wants. Watch what happens if he gets his hands on the ‘dessert’, he’ll be like a child eating a big bowl of chocolate pudding…
in the living room. By himself.
Scamp Dog
@Litlebritdifrnt: Speaking of UK accents, can you place the old guy in this Youtube video?
jl
All presidents should sound like this:
William McKinley – 1896 campaign speech
http://youtu.be/m6ZUneyU7Vo
And not like this vulgarian.
Teddy Roosevelt Speech on Social and Industrial Justice
http://youtu.be/ch5XlY4nKJI
I think TR went a little light on the terminal ‘g’ at the beginning. The rot started with him.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
OT: CBS evening news did a segment on Spain having it’s debt downgraded and the reporter finding bad unemployment for the most educated generation ever. I wonder how fast Krugman will jump on this?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Bloix: Almost makes it sound like drooping you gs is conversation American dialect English.
Patricia Kayden
Lipton is alright. Saying that President Obama should say “going to” instead of “gonna” or that he shouldn’t drop his “G”s is a minor criticism.
I’m sure Lipton was trying to be funny, so I’ll give him a pass. Surely any President will sound like a scholar in comparison to the Shrub.
honus
@CW in LA: Laura Ingraham attended UVA, where the practice of snobbery is a high art. She has no standing to call anybody an elitist.
Stuck in the Funhouse
Speaking of pretentious assholes.
I’m so sick of these Clintonista backstabbing shitheads, and request they go straight to hell. Bill can raise cash, but that is about all he is good for, these days. Oddly, the only one with any class whatsoever, concerning Obama, and anything else, is Hillary.
But really, how dumb can you be and still get on the teevee, claiming Hillary would have gotten a better Health Care bill, say, like the one that worked out so well in 1993.
Fucking democrats, what you gonna do.
schrodinger's cat
@Patricia Kayden: I think Palin was worse than Bush, infinitely more annoying in my opinion.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Amir Khalid:
Oh absolutely, the reason I took voice training was because I was part of the healthy RN theatre community and I was always cast as the maid in any production we did. With my accent I could not possibly be cast as the Lady of the House. My first role after the voice training was the “Lady of the House” in an Agatha Christie play. I wish I could remember the name of the play. (Never mind it was “Murder at the Vicarage).
David Koch
Did you guys see “The Daily Show” last night? Turns out Jon Stewart was against the recall.
Stewart said what Walker did was “Shitty” but he was against using a recall for a policy action he disagreed with.
Now, here’s Stewart, a self described socialist, who’s very well read, who is the son of a union teacher, who is a New York City intellectual, who constantly criticizes Obama for not being liberal enough and he opposed the recall.
This just shows how Doug’s long time anger with totebag liberals is well placed. But it also shows how difficult it is to herd liberal cats. When you can’t even get a socialist son of a union teacher to support you, then think how hard it is to get low info voters to join in agree.
RD
Hippies don’t watch Inside the Actors Studio.
That would more or less be validating The Man.
CW in LA
@jl: My mind is blown. First, I had no idea audio recordings were possible in 1896.
I’m struck by how much McKinley rolls his ‘r’s here. Was that standard, or was he trying to enunciate really carefully for the crowd?
Plus, while I imagine they would have agreed on very little, McKinley’s cadences remind me a little of Dr. King’s. Was Dr. King’s approach just really old fashioned, or is that also a technique learned from speaking to large groups with poor amplification and/or acoustics?
jl
Thanks to commenters for mentionin’ that taleratin’ gosh gollyin’ go get er donerin’ grifterin’ Palin. Down in the Perry circle of language hell.
I wonder if her name is really Paling.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@David Koch:
Jon Stewart was never funny until Comedy Central hired some writers to help him out. On his own, he was a weak comic.
His political opinions are pretty much the same thing, weak.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Violet:
Oh God I was so in love with a Geordie once that my entire life was ruled by it. Of course it helped the fact that he was utterly gorgeous but I would melt every time he spoke to me. I remember sneaking to his office from my office without my hat and a ciggy in my hand once and my Leading Wren spotted me. Damn did that result in a dressing down from hell.
David Koch
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
That worked so well the first time.
Sad, looks like Rendell has early onset dementia, cuz he obviously doesn’t remember 1994.
Tokyokie
@Amir Khalid: I learned about the hierarchy of British accents when I worked a job a long, long time ago with an English guy from Norfolk, a couple of Welsh brothers, a Gibraltarian, a Scotsman and a handful of Geordies. None of us could stand the Englishman, who liked to put on airs, although it’d be difficult to say whether the Welsh brothers or the Geordies disliked him more (although the Geordies’ jibes were much funnier and tended to zoom right over his head). But being around that guy taught me fairly quickly that an English accent doesn’t make you smart.
Weirdly, the Gibraltarian considered himself more British than the others, while the other Brits basically thought he was a Spaniard.
honus
@Amir Khalid: No, I don’t remember LBJ dropping his g’s, (unless he was in a really informal setting). He was from a working class background and went to lengths to avoid appearing unsophisticated or unintelligent. Following JFK may have been a factor also.
It’s recent phenomenon that rich republican politicians think they need to sound like regular workin’ class dudes. Bush had some rudimentary feel for it, probably because he spent some time in Texas suburbs and the military, and was with drunks for a big part of his life, but anybody who saw him trying to use a chain saw knew he warn’t no good old boy.
LanceThruster
@Baud: When I first heard the term “Mom jeans” in regards to Rmoney, I knew exactly what was meant.
His speech mannerisms smack of someone trying to go through the motions of expression and eye contact much as the old animatronic Mr. Lincoln exhibit at Disneyland.
At least when they get caught dead to rights, the Catholic Church cops to the fact that child rape is a bad thing.
Where is the Church of LDS or their president/prophet weighing in on Mitten’s lying?
You’d think a sectarian org so big on public displays of morality (so much so that cola and coffee, let alone a stiff belt are verboten) would come out against one of their own so prominently in the spotlight lying so continually.
If not, eff them and their effin’ POS cult. Nobody’s mythology is any more or less true, but at least nut up on the things you claim to be for.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
I do, but it’s when he’s giving his speeches with the soaring rhetoric and broad themes. When he gives those, he has a tendency to develop a stilted, unnatural cadence that I find very distracting. He’s a better orator when he’s speaking off the cuff because he’s spending his time thinking about his answers and forgets to follow the bad advice his speech coach seems to have given him about dramatic oratory.
Heliopause
They should rename the Moore Award the Doug J Award.
The Sailor
@Jonny Scrum-half: I use ‘folks’ when I don’t want to be gender specific.
Also, too, I never pronounce the ‘l’.
Tokyokie
@Violet: Well, assuming they can wade through it, which is made even more difficult by their tendency to make the accent thicker if they think you’re having trouble understanding them.
Damm, I thought the Geordies I knew were a hoot.
Arclite
Well, Obama dropping his g’s is something I’ve noticed in his campaign speeches since 2008. As much as I like Obama, this thing has grated on me when I hear it, because it’s an affectation. He doesn’t do it otherwise.
I’ll grant you though, it’s the bottom, bottom, bottom of the importance list for things to discuss. And the “educated” comment is just douchbaggery.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Scamp Dog:
I would guess, from the snippet, Cornish or Devon. Here is a fun fact. I was posted to Scotland after I had spent two years in Hong Kong. I was fairly happy with conversing with people in Hong Kong and I could understand them. When I got to Dunfermline in Scotland I went out shopping the first weekend I got there. I stood in the middle of a Superdrug and realized that I could not understand a single word that anyone was saying. It was bizarre.
Violet
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Ah, yes, I see the magic of the Geordie accent hasn’t escaped you. As an American, watching women swoon over a Geordie accent is a bit mystifying. They all sound “British” to most Americans. Or make that “Australian”, since that is what a lot of English seem to be mistaken for over here.
bemused
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Just had a surprising conversation with a friend who thinks that if Hilary had been president, she may have gotten more cooperation from Republicans than Obama has. I disagreed. The Republican game plan would be identical…so no to everything and anything the Dem president advocated.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Jonny Scrum-half: I disagree. I think folks is just about one of the best words he can choose. No race overtones, no gender overtones, works for both urban and rural dwellers, and (in the North American context) refers to non-elites as a group with interests of their own.
Look at the people who define folk music in North America; Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Ledbelly, and so on.
No… folks is an excellent choice, and speaks well of the quality of his education, imho.
Violet
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Oh, my goodness yes! Part of the family lives in Scotland, and in a small rural village at that, and there are times I haven’t a clue what people are saying at, say, the supermarket.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Violet: When you think about it for a bit, he’s saying Obama’s diction is going downhill a bit… and that Romney may well be a sociopath.
I’m not quite sure what everyone’s problem with this is.
polyorchnid octopunch
@David Koch: ftw
Litlebritdifrnt
@Violet:
The funny thing about the Australian accent is that is appears to have taken the “low” road as opposed to the “high” road. We all know that Aus was founded on convicts and people sent there to control them. The accent that the Country has chosen is more closely related to the “cockney” accent of the majority of convicts who were sent there for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread as opposed to the ruling class that were sent there to keep them in check. I am always fascinated by the way the Aus accent is closest to Cockney.
boss bitch
@bemused:
Had the same conversation with a co-worker. I was quite vocal in my disagreement. It was actually me against 3 co-workers. They listened to conventional wisdom.
Violet
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Wouldn’t that sort of make sense, though, from a numbers point of view. More convicts than guards. Also, there’s some sort of cachet in Australia if you’re descended from a convict, isn’t there? Kind of like the Mayflower here.
Tokyokie
@Litlebritdifrnt: I never had a problem understanding people from Edinburgh, and after a bit, I could understand the Aberdeen accent as well, but for the life of me, I can’t understand what it is they’re saying in Glasgow.
CW in LA
@bemused: You’re absolutely right. The biggest difference is that there would have been more creepy misogyny and less creepy racism, but otherwise it would have been pretty much the same.
So, yes, I am a little sheepish about having gotten as worked up as I did over the Obama-Clinton slap-fight in ’08. Of course, I still think we picked right, if only because HRC let herself get rolled on the Iraq war (which the “at least Hillary would have had balls” set would do well to remember).
RD
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
He was funny enough to get his own show. CC never would have bothered without Jon as the anchor.
Short of Jon singing The Internationale before each ep, what would make you happy?
Roger Moore
@CW in LA:
Edison invented the Photograph well before then, in the 1870s. I don’t think recordings were very common back then, but it’s not too surprising that an important person like the POTUS would be recorded a few times.
Roger Moore
@David Koch:
FTFY.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Violet:
My cousins husband is proud of the fact that his ancestor “yorky” was sent there for fighting in the streets. It is a matter of pride for him.
@Tokyokie:
It depends what part of Edinburgh or Dunfermline you are from, I dated a pilot who was from Morningside and like the Geordie accent his Edingburgh Morningside accent would make me melt, immediately.
Joel
Hopefully KJ and Hondo take care of business tonight.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@bemused: @boss bitch: ..and if Paul Tsongas had won…. and if Mario Cuomo had run…. if Bobby Kennedy hadn’t been shot….
I don’t think ‘wingers play that game, except maybe from 76 to 80. It’s just one more way wishy-washy Dem leaners undermine themselves. I personally think Hillary would’ve lost to McCain, or more accurately Bubba and Mark Penn would’ve found a way to blow it for her. Starting with the no-Palin McCain campaign. And as long as we’re going into hypotheticals, when did Hillary win the nomination? Before or after she pissed off African-Americans and anti-war voters all over again (“just a speech…”)? One of the reasons I don’t like to think about ’08 is that I like HIllary CLinton, a lot more than I like or ever liked her husband, and I want her to run in ’16, and it makes me mad to think just how bad she was in the ’08 campaign.
DougJ
@Keith:
Ha ha.
David Koch
@RD:
slight correction. Stewart was not the first host of TDS. Craig Kilborn was the first host and hosted the show for 2 1/2 years until he moved on to do a show following Letterman on CBS, which he did for 6 years.
Steward did have 2 prior talk shows before TDS (1 on MTV and 1 in syndication), which were both quickly canceled.
being the replacement host for an established program, that already had great talent, such as stephen colbert, and a very good staff of writers was a good fit.
Could stewart make another show succeed on his own without a battery of great writers – who knows, but he failed trying to do so, twice before.
FlipYrWhig
@bemused: Wait a minute… As I recall the argument from 2007 was that Hillary Clinton would be a more ruthless partisan than squishy kumbayah Obama. It was Hillary supporters who said that. How does that translate into Republican cooperation?
I guaran-damn-tee you that if Clinton had prevailed, the second-guessing among the pro-Obama crowd would have been feverish, and the number one thing that would be being repeated would be that Obama would have been better able to work with Republicans, because harpy Hillary Clinton was someone they had two decades to work on despising, and why oh why didn’t the stupid Democrats turn to a fresh face like Barack Obama?
trollhattan
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Read this and my legs automatically crossed.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: The Clintons know how to fight Republicans and WIN! was the mantra I remember. The evidence for this was two non-majority presidential wins against weak opponents, being impeached but not convicted, and Hillary’s mighty victory in one of the bluest states in the country over fearsome opponents like Rick Lazio and that old guy who agreed to run against her in ’06 if the state party paid his country club dues for the rest of his life and he didn’t have to campaign more than once a week, and no overnights.
and again, I don’t hate the Clintons, I hate the myth that they are the invincible dragon slayers of so many imaginations.
CW in LA
I will say Clinton’s been a good secretary of state, and on that basis I’d be more willing to vote for her in ’16 than I was in ’08.
RD
@David Koch:
Craig Kilborn did six years with CBS because he promised to stop drinking.
Good for him.
Just Some Fuckhead
That’s pretty insightful about Romney but I think he misses the larger picture in regards to Obama. As a highly educated and brilliant wordsmith myself, I often find it necessary to dumb it down a little for the proles. I imagine it’s prolly the same, even for the little bit of communicating Obama has to do.
Keith G
@RD:
For some, never, never, never criticize a certain president would be a start.
bemused
@boss bitch:
My friend is a big Obama fan so this did surprise me a bit. Republicans made it clear they wanted it all their way or the highway. They would have just used different tactics to discredit Hilary.
TenguPhule
So big stick pictures or mimes?
bemused
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I agree. Hilary went off track in her campaign. It bothered me a lot. She is a lot smarter than that. Obama just looked better as a result to me. I doubt she’d make the same mistake again. Mark Penn…why would anyone hire him?
TenguPhule
Which is always neither conventional nor wise.
Villago Delenda Est
@Linda Featheringill:
Can’t you find some old wax cylinders of Jackson addressing the Cherokee Nation as they boarded the train of tears to the relocation zone?
celticdragonchick
@Violet:
I agree. Lipton is dead on correct that Romney’s eyes do not match whatever emotion he is supposedly conveying.
Unsympathetic
@Linda Featheringill:
Andrew Jackson did drop G’s.
He ended the Second National Bank of the US.
aa
Lipton makes perfectly good sense to me.
I think he attaches less importance to these remarks than you do.
He also handled Ali G. rather well.
Liked the Reichstag fire, by the way (not the real one, yours).
David Koch
@bemused:
Special prosecutor to investigate her murder of Vince Foster and cattle futures.
MGB
@Tokyokie: Things I learned at college: At my school, sophomores were required to spend their summer term at school. Summer is when the exchange students from the University of Edinburgh spent their time at Dartmouth. My immediate group of friends (three) somehow after a drunken night made good friends with the entire Edinburgh group. One girl from Belfast, one from Edinburgh, a Glaswegian and one from Kensington in London. That summer, I learned to understand drunk Glaswegian and a British accent doesn’t automatically make one wise.
RD
@David Koch:
Fun fact: The Hilary camp kick-started the birther movement.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@RD:
Ahhh, another squirrel/fan of Jon’s occasional nut-finding. Anyone with any comedic taste at all would choke to say that any of his early stuff was good. He was a Hail Mary for Comedy Central after Kilborn bailed. His early Daily Show stuff sucked until the writers upped their game to make up for his lame delivery. I will admit that he has been better as the years pass but at the root he’s still Jon Stewart, just another comic with an opinion that is sometimes good and sometimes bad.
Colbert is the ‘real deal’, Stewart is an actor reciting his lines.
@David Koch:
That too. Also. :)
gelfling545
@Stuck in the Funhouse: And really, can there be any more futile pass time than trying to determine what someone might possibly have done if circumstances were completely different from what they are?
Tehanu
Lipton is a pretentious suckup but occasionally he gets into something interesting, and he did write a wonderful book called An Exaltation of Larks listing collective nouns (a pod of whales, a herd of cattle, a pride of lions, etc.)
I love the Scots accents generally, although we have one friend in Stirling who is about 90% incomprehensible and rattles on at a terrific rate. If we just smile and nod a lot it doesn’t seem to matter. His wife has the same accent but speaks with complete clarity so it’s not the accent exactly; it’s more the slurring and speed. I also pride myself on being able to distinguish between a New Zealand accent (“I mit him at the station”) and a South Efrican one … not that I meet a lot of people from either place … and also was able to correctly place a Geordie once. She almost fainted from the shock as every other American she’d ever met thought she was a Cockney.
YellowJournalism
All this talk about British accents making people seem smarter reminds me of Charlize Theron’s run on Arrested Development.
RD
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
The reason CNN’s Crossfire is no longer on the air.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@RD:
Squirrel finds nut and cracks it open, big deal. Consistency, or the lack of, is Jon’s fatal flaw.
Accidents happen and Jon got lucky, whoopee.
Roger Moore
@gelfling545:
Trying to prove that what just happened didn’t really happen. People still do it all the time.
RD
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
No…he said what was on his mind at considerable risk.
Just like he does now. You don’t like what you’re hearing and you’re being childish about it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@RD:
ah yes, he risked the wrath of the mighty Tucker Carlson on a show that had been in decline for a good decade, had long lost its marquee names, and had been moved from prime time to mid afternoon. Truly, he was like a modern day … somebody.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@RD:
It isn’t that I’m not hearing what I want to, that’s awful damned pretentious of you BTW, it’s that Jon lacks any consistency in what he does. Remember his ‘both sides do it’ regarding the Tea Party? Yeah, sure they do Jon.
That’s just one of his many blurbs of beauty. Love him all you want but I look at the total scoreboard, not just the home runs.
The left needs every voice they can get since they have so few, thus the love for Jon.
Desperate people and all that…
Southern Beale
Meh. This seems pretty pale. Sometimes Obama does try to dumb down his speech patterns. I don’t mind but I don’t expect it, either. Really I’m of a generation where presidenets were expected to not speak like us commoners
It’s interesting that this conversation even happened though because I’ve always said Romney’s voice creeps me the fuck out. There’s something to robotic, too tinny about it. Serial killer speech. If he were to say the name “Clarice” or “what’s the frequency Kenneth” I’d jump out of my skin.
RD
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Hitler?
RD
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Of course not.
E Stamm
Lipton is the worst interviewer I’ve ever seen. Ever see him? He asks an interesting question, but when the actor’s answer just BEGS for a follow up, he just goes to the next question on his list. It’s like he never pays attention to what his guest is actually saying. He is just a pompous ass.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@RD: Kind of an odd response.
I will say its funny. I remember when DougJ posted something critical of Our Hipster David Broder a couple years ago, there seemed to be a lot of posters who rose up in righteous indignation to defend their best TeeVee friend. He said he had never gotten such hostile blowback. Now just one defender for St Stewart the Ironically Disappointed.
RD
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’m sure there’s more than one.
It would be pretentious to assume otherwise.
LanceThruster
@Tehanu: My favorite is “a murder of crows.”
ruemara
@RD: He’s a tool. Stewart is a tool. He’s got his good moments, but he’s mostly oversimplified broderism masquerading as insightful news. Why news? Because amongst all the liberals and progressives I know, nearly every last one of them list him as a news source. Major, major facepalm moment. Stewart is moderately funny and disappointment is his stock in trade. Of course, spending your time defending him from criticism as if he’s some principled martyr, is your right.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It’s what I expect from fanbois, you can’t reason with them. They’re like conservatives in that respect. You can try to reason with them but there’s no reason there. Once you engage them and discover what you’re dealing with, the best thing is to back away and let them live their delusion.
It keeps them happy.
LanceThruster
Re: the Stewart v. Kilborn advocates, I’d say it’s no more monumental than the MST3K Joel/Mike shift. Both have their strengths and it’s not like you wouldn’t have your own favorite.
I liked Kilborn well enough (he had smug bemusement down) but I couldn’t imagine him actually getting involved in the story like Stewart did telling the frauds on CNN’s Crossfire that they were hurting news and political reporting. For that alone he belongs in at least the same category consideration as Colbert does for his smack down of Bush at the DC Correspondent Dinner (and the rest of his mental Jui-jitsu…his Neil Patrick Harris interview was priceless). Stewart grew into the job (by whatever means), and I’m quite grateful to have him.
I don’t care about how well his earlier gigs did (of which a saw little of them), he’s kickin’ ass and taking names on at least a good number of issues that LITERALLY deserve a response of “What are you, a retard?!” yet has “serious” news treating these extremist stances as wholly legitimate.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@LanceThruster:
I’m not a Kilborn advocate either, he was good at what he did and that’s it, nothing stellar. I would agree that Jon is better than him on the show but that still doesn’t make Jon everything that some on the left like to make him out to be. Jon finds some nuts once in a while, good for him doing that.
But that’s it. IMO, he could be much more than he has made himself out to be but in his own way, he’s a villager too.
One that tries to be funny.
David Koch
For a long period of time, Stewart was really good. Sadly he’s jumped the shark.
He’s really trying hard to become Broder, constantly with the “both sides” crap and “the Democrats are too mean to the republicans” nonsense.