I'm a great fan of John Cleese of Monty Python's Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers. He and his cohorts have produced some of the funniest stuff ever for TV and movies, and they're as smart as anyone around.
So it was great to come upon an interview that John Cleese did the other day in which he pretty much nailed the (ahem) phenomenon of Sarah Palin. According to Mr. Cleese, Sarah Palin is little more than a parrot who memorizes rightwing talking points and regurgitates them, even though she has little idea of what they mean.
And he broke the sad news to his former Python-mate, Michael Palin, that he's not the funniest Palin anymore.
Video below:
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I'm not sure I agree with Mr. Cleese's characterization entirely. I do think Sarah Palin has a very ugly, nasty side that is very comfortable with the general ugly, nasty side of Republicanism, including the hate, fear, paranoia, rampant dishonesty, and off-the-meter hypocrisy. The fact that she mostly recites garbled Republican talking points, and doesn't seem to have the intelligence that God gave lint, does not mean she isn't fundamentally on board for the GOP message. And that's of her own volition -- she's no helpless pawn.
But I still loved Cleese's take on her as unacceptably, even laughably stupid. It's so clear to anyone with half a brain stem, and the only people that Palin appeals to are reptile-brained rightwingers who love the heady hate-brew of ugly, un-American views coming from a somewhat attractive woman.
John Cleese is an Englishman now nearly in his 70s, but he seems to get the state of things in the U.S.A. as well as anybody these days. In case anyone missed it, last week Mr. Cleese actually sent a poem to be read on Keith Olbermann's show recently, re Sean Hannity. It's at the end of the segment below, after Robert Gibbs schools the cowardly, fascist sonofabitch.
Here's the text, followed by Olbermann's reading of the poem:
Ode to Sean Hannity
by John Cleese
Aping urbanity,
Oozing with vanity,
Plump as a manatee,
Faking humanity,
Intellectual inanity,
Journalistic calamity,
Fox Noise insanity,
You’re a profanity,
Hannity