For those who aren't late night television watchers, Craig Ferguson is (in my opinion) one of the funniest and most subversive comedians on TV. He's Scottish, ok, and about my age, which means that when he was in his 20's, he lived in a socialist Britain (and Scotland was even more radical than England). I know because I lived there too, in the ancient mists of time, ie, the 70's, before Maggie Thatcher, when the unions were strong and no one who could get into college paid a cent - in fact, you got a stipend that was enough to live on. Oh, and it goes without saying that health care was universal and free.
Anyway - Craig Ferguson devoted his entire monologue tonight to a hilarious and truly angry rant about McCain suspending his campaign and about Wall Street. And given that the show was taped earlier in the day, he did this virtually off the cuff. Some of his best lines below the fold, as well as video...
After mocking McCain for canceling Letterman:
I can't believe John McCain wants to suspend the debate. You can't suspend the democratic process because we're facing problems. At what point do you think then, maybe we should suspend the elections? We'll have the elections later.... Some people have done that before - Castro did it, Napoleon did it, Julius Caesar did it...
Like it or not, the campaign is part of the democratic process...you don't suspend the democratic process! We didn't do it for 9/11, we didn't do it for Pearl Harbor, we didn't do it for the Nazis, we didn't do it for the British. We don't do it! Democracy first!
He then continued, for quite a while, about whether to bail out Wall Street. Setting aside whether he was serious about letting companies fail (after all, he's not an economist), the best part of the clip below is around :56, when he contrasts capitalism and democracy, boiling it down brilliantly:
They're saying if we go bankrupt, we'll lose our freedom. That's crap! Capitalism and democracy are not the same thing! Democracy creates equality; capitalism creates inequality. They need each other to survive; they kind of complement each other, but they kind of hate each other as well - they're like the Olsen twins if you imagine.
In the set up for his next joke, there's real anger in his questions about who deserves or doesn't deserve a bail-out:
I don't understand this government bail-out. Where's the government bail-out of the 10 million uninsured children? Where's the government bail-out of the people who are losing their homes? Where's the government bail-out of the people who are losing all their money betting on Dancing with the Stars, and it going terribly wrong?
The rest of the show was pretty dumb, but I thought his opening was brilliant and spot-on. I just wish he was on earlier, so more people could have seen it. He's a smart-ass, all right, but he's also one of the most sincerely patriotic people you see on television these days. And he sees right through the Republicans...