Reply #22: Understand that I'm not questioning MM's technique [View All]

Since R&M he has worked as a satirist, using fictive techniques to arrive at a more powerful statement of the truth than he'd get if he were, for instance, working with PBS.

Not understanding when a satirist is satirizing and when she or he is being forthright is a common RW technique for defusing satire: "If Al Franken lies to Ashcroft on Harvard stationery, then how can we trust him when he says that the Wellstone memorial was 99% nonpartisan"?

And I thought that Letterman was missing the complexity of MM's art--reducing F911 to a deadly earnest joke, a fiction, an agit-prop, but not all of them at once (which is what I assume it'll be). Cf. this article from the NYT (NOT the paper of record anymore, but one that gets pushed out there when some dip wants you to accept its meme-pushing as awakening lefty conscience): http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/movies/20SHEN.html?hp