Monday, November 08, 2010

STEVEN WEBER MAD!!! STEVEN WEBER SMASH!!!!


Huffington Post provides a service. It allows actors and comedians--regardless of intellectually capacity or political knowledge--to vent on the issues of the day. HuffPo provides these celebrities with a big platform on the most popular left-leaning “news” site on the internet.

One of the sites regular contributors is former "Wings" star Steven Weber.

A particularly angry leftist, Weber was clearly upset by the Republican's smashing victory at the polls last Tuesday. Fortunately, HuffPo was there to let him blow off some steam. And blow he did. With a 444-word screed that would have conveyed just as much in two sentences.

"Conservatives are evil. They are also stupid."

That's basically what he said but, in typical leftist fashion, it took him forever to say it. Like a speech by Jesse Jackson, Weber's posts are filled to the brim with impressive vocabulary. But his clever wordplay never masks the fact that his writing is completely void of meaningful or original content.

His discombobulated thoughts are messily dumped on the page amounting to nothing more than an exercise in name-calling. There is no thesis. No organization. And yet Ariana Huffington has decided to give Weber a weekly column from which to rant wildly. One has to assume that he qualified for this valuable piece of Internet real-estate solely because of his life as semi-famous actor, because he’s certainly not a writer.

In his "article" Weber makes the following keen observations about conservatives and Republicans:

We are "twisting the truth."

We "Tread over the confused, abused, unknowing masses."

Our candidates are "trolls and drones."

We're "moronic," "frothing," "dirty" and "mean."

Our "scorched-earth approach to all things is like a nightmare!"

All this while the "Moderate Middle and its liberal allies" waste time with its "adherence to the rules of play in the face of an opposition which has dispensed with boundaries and absolutely, fundamentally loathes rules."

Weber has penned dozens of these rants. They are each the same. Take a news item. Mention it at the beginning of your piece then spend the next 400 words telling readers that conservatives are awful, dangerous, knuckle-draggers with a tendency towards "teabagging."

All the while "truth and decency have a liberal bias."

I don't want to give Weber too much attention. He's representative of the political discourse problems we've been having in this country since the Bush years drove the Left to the brink of setting themselves on fire in front of the White House like a bunch of depressed monks.

Arianna Huffington is really to blame here. Clearly she'll give just about anyone on the Left their own Huffington blog, while providing little to no editorial oversight. While she has hundreds of pseudo-political commentators blogging under her banner, quantity certainly trumps quality in most instances.

Keep in mind that Huff Po is the first place that a significant portion of the Left goes for their news every morning. I think we can all agree that reading a Steven Weber column and assuming that your mind is expanding in any way is insane.

And yet, it's Huffington herself who co-opted John Stewart’s rally in an attempt to secure the mantle of “sanity” for those on the left. Like Huffington, Weber has deluded himself into believing that the far-left is more ideologically in synch with the “moderate middle” than are conservatives despite the fact that conservatives just spent the last two years successfully reminding Independent voters of why they’ve always hated the progressive agenda.

A lot of decent journalism ends up on HuffPo’s homepage. But wasting quality bandwidth on Weber makes it difficult to take the site seriously. Ditto for celebrities like Russell Simmons, Alec Baldwin, John Cusack and of course, Hugo Chavez pal Sean Penn. But it was these very celebrities and their crazed rants against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that made the site the powerhouse that it is today. Just goes to show you how powerful, uninformed celebrity anger can be when building a leftist coalition. Just make sure you cut them loose once you get the power you’ve been trying to achieve. For a good example of how to do this, see Barack Obama.

But please Arianna, for the sake of your less sophisticated readers. Don’t present celebrities like Weber as having any sort of above average insight into the American political scene. It doesn’t benefit anyone. Well, except Steven Weber, of course.

Sphere: Related Content

2 comments:

Ed Baine said...

The best part? You spent 707 words essentially railing against someone else using 444 words to state something simple. Thank goodness for that First Amendment, eh?

Anonymous said...

I agree with you completely. I can feel the veins protesting against the skin on his forehead as I read his rants. I am oddly drawn to them because I believe his intolerance and disgust of mainstream Americans will cause him to snap into irreversible madness. I would enjoy seeing that. His style is playful and clever, but not thought provoking or original, unless you give credit for the application of top-notch prep school wordplay that is engaged in either to make Steve feel unusually gifted or insightful or make us believe that he is. Certainly, the fact that there is no meat beneath the gravy should be evidence enough.