An email form reader Jeff

Just a note:

This quote:

Koppel set the tone for the evening by opening the March 4 live broadcast (EST/CST feed) with this supposed joke which undermined the moral superiority of the U.S. position: “There's a sardonic two-liner making the rounds in Washington these days: 'How do we know that Saddam Hussein has biological and chemical weapons? We have the receipts.' Nasty, but there's an element of truth to it.”

Just wanted to point out the great standup comedian, the late Bill Hicks, used to do this in his routine. Something like (paraphrased of course):

“Iraq has terrible weapons, awful weapons. How do we know? Uh, we looked at the receipt. In fact it’s a check, but as soon as that sucker clears we’re goin in!”

Not suggesting Koppel plagiarizes from stand up comics, but…. When Bill Hicks said it, we were in Bush The Elder’s Reign Of Bombs. This is such a well-worn joke, we laugh about in locker rooms and over holiday dinners when we talk to our weird uncles. It’s been a water-cooler snicker for over a decade, and not just among racial comics. There’s much more than an element of truth to it. Everyone in America, from the stoner in my mailroom to my sister the Soccer Mom has been chuckling over the absurdity of it for years.

But when Koppel says it actually seems cutting edge and controversial.

Do these guys really believe they are offering insights? Do they really think we don’t know? How badly out of touch is our media? How dumb do they think we are? How poorly have they served us? Does our government also think we are chumps, that Bush’s constant reminders to “go tell a neighbor you love em” actually passes for sense and leadership.

There’s a deep sense of the hypocrisy in US policy eating at all of us. And younger people are growing up totally disillusioned. I had to come by my own cynicism as an adult. I believe the media and the establishment have no real idea how widespread is the sense of our government being totally immoral and false. And it may seem like they can lead us into anything with a blank check now, while there are still some people tethered to the ship as it goes down. But there’s also another class of people totally cynical, who never had anything noble to believe in and never will. And with Bush ripping the nest egg out from under them too, you’re going to have a scary kind of political nihilism jumping out at us from a corner not too far in our future