I'll Bet She'd Be A Fun Date

Here's a perfect example of the mindset of your average, humorless, liberal apparatchik.

A gal from one of these "alternative" weeklies in LA (side note: if they're all so "alternative," how come every city has one and they all look and sound exactly alike?) interviews Jay Leno and hammers him for not bringing enough affirmative action into his nightly comedy monologue. She thinks he's been handling those dirty Republicans with kid gloves.

Here are a few of her questions:

• "The White House strategy is to ridicule Kerry every single day of the campaign. And obviously The Tonight Show will be the first to pick up on that. How do you decide if you're being used to further some political party's ends?"

• "Here's my problem with the monologue. You can tell that something's featured on The Drudge Report, the writers have seen it, and the monologue is playing off that. But there's a lot of other news that gets ignored. How come there's no humor made of the fact that Cheney is making people take loyalty oaths before anyone is allowed at his rallies?"

• "The media seems to only present the Republican spin and to not present the other side of what's going on."

• "It was totally inappropriate for you to push Schwarzenneger's candidacy and then emcee his victory party. It hurt your objectivity."

• I'm not the only journalist who has perceived for a while that you seem to be bashing Clinton as if it were back in the Clinton administration instead of bashing Bush.

Fun, no?

But that's the liberal mind. Even comedy is only "acceptable" when it's used in service of the approved viewpoint. It doesn't matter if it's funny, it only matters whether or not it serves The Party. She must be driven nuts by all those conservative comedians out there like Dennis Miller and....well, there could be another one somewhere...

The only thing sadder in this interview is the gymnastic routine Leno does to try to make the interviewer like him. You see, at one point she had written a column criticizing Leno for being too right-wing in his monologue. Like a puppy dog, he put his tail between his legs and called her up to "correct the record."

In his pitiable striving to gain her approval, at one point he even says to her "I believe the media is in the pocket of the government, and they don't do their job. They have people like Michael Moore who do it for them." At another point he answers her question about how weird it is that talk radio leans so far to the right by saying "No, it's not weird. Because liberal people don't need to hear their view expressed over and over again. I think some people on the right need to hear this constant reinforcement, whereas I don't find that necessary."

That's the reason Leno has always been a pygmy next to Letterman's giant. Leno has an pathetic desperation to be liked that rivals that of Robin Williams--which is no small accomplishment. Can you even begin to imagine David Letterman calling up some ditz reporter from Supermarket Weekly to plead with her to change her opinion of him?