You'd think these guys would be grateful that Colbert was going to quit riffing on them in order to collect millions for looking up movie starlets' skirts while trading japes with his yet to be announced sidekick, but no. This is the natural human reaction to promoting a person who regularly exposes you to be a blathering pinhead, a screeching moron, or an intellectual prostitute and it would take another billion years of the evolution that right wing bloviators don't believe in for it to be otherwise.
O'Reilly even sneered that Colbert currently "only has about a million viewers" as opposed to the number that O'Reilly's show puts up, although if we analyze the viewer demographic of each show in terms of audience members that have actually read a book or flown in an airplane without being thoroughly drunk, the numbers are probably pretty even.
Still, Colbert is about to get much more famous. Right now many, many people would not know who Steven Colbert was if he showed up at their funeral, especially if they were being buried in someplace like Tanzania, although I say with confidence, and a touch of pride, that he is not nearly as widely ignored as I am.
In the category of We Can't Stop Spouting Idiot Feces No Matter How Much We Try, we had two notable entrants recently—Jim DeMint, a former Senator who now claims that the federal government had nothing to do with the abolition of slavery. It was natural Christian impulses that destroyed the institution, the ex-Senator claims. In DeMint's view, the Battle of Gettysburg was some sort of enormous church picnic with cavalry charges, and the fellow that made those remarks afterward had nothing to do with the outcome.
This minimizing of the role of the government in the Civil War begs two questions, the first being is there really another institution that can put down an armed rebellion like a central government, and the second being that without a central government, what exactly is the point of having an armed rebellion?
The second example of boldly burying one's head up one's gastrointestinal tract comes from the above-mentioned Rush Limbaugh, who opened up a whole new category of skeptics--"shoe truthers." These are people who believe that Hillary Clinton threw a shoe at herself during a recent speech, an incident that has been widely publicized. Now, most of the shoe truthers (or boot believers, or flip-flop flippers, however they like to be characterized) would happily toss a shoe at Clinton themselves. In fact, they could think of no more pleasurable activity that putting Clinton in some sort of carnival stocks, buying a box or two of shoes at a thrift store, and pelting her leisurely with them, all the while saying things like "This shoe is the exact same size as Monica Lewinsky's" or "This boot has the dust of Benghazi all over it!"
But when someone actually attempts to hit Hillary with a shoe, they give the attempted assailant no credit for being one of them. No, the truthers believe that Clinton caused that footwear missile to be thrown at herself, to advance her not-yet-announced Presidential campaign. Machiavellianly, she has completely cornered the support of people who will vote for anyone that has had a shoe thrown at them for President. Just add that demographic to the rest of her base, and you have to admit one thing:
She looks like a shoo-in.
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