Edit - I don’t remember where I read/heard it, but I remember very early on someone said that liberals will one day turn on Israel but it’ll be after a certain number of people begin dying - 5k, 10k, 30k, 50k. I wish I could find it.
That perfectly encapsulated the liberal mindset. They won’t stand with us before the atrocity begins, when we are saying this will happen - only when it’s already happening and their conscience gets in the way. (I’m talking about the people, not the ones in charge - the latter know perfectly well what they’re doing, of course).
It’s just endlessly frustrating, because the same thing happens over and over again.
He may not be CIA but his wife is FBI (or maybe it was NSA, either way) and a republican too, he met her while covering the RNC for the daily show
I agree, I even mentioned it.
The point is that, like every personal account I’ve ever heard about him, he met someone who was, ostensibly, his adversary and when they weren’t a total monster to him personally he not only began defending them, but married them. His romantic life is none of my business, but the point is that this is who he has always been.
His place in American media (yes Chomsky, etc etc) is because of this. But there’s a class dynamic that I think Americans miss. John Oliver is a particular type of British middle class lib who found the social mobility he so desperately craved in British society, but eventually realised he would never get, by going to the US and laying down in the street for the establishment right.
The reason I bring this up is because it is far, far from unique. Take a good amount of British MPs for example, particularly on the Labour side. They’re fucking obsessed with their working group trips to Washington to meet Clinton staffers and take pointers on how to strategize for love then out elections. If you ask most of them (the most obvious shadows cabinet ghouls aside) straightforwardly they do a little song and dance about how far gone American politics is, division, British institutions, blah blah blah and then their eyes light up and their tone shifts as they start to picture the life they imagine for themselves in the US when they leave their lowly government jobs, assuming they make the right ghoulish connections.
The American dream is alive. It’s just for a handful of aspiring upper-middle class political operators who will do anything to make three times the wage (but have twice fhe expenses) in the US and seem like the ‘reasonable European observers’ instead of the slime that lubricates a hundreds of years old engine of decay and shame keep chugging along.
The same way crooked local politicians across the globe have been bought off and fed fantasies by the US state throughout history. The difference is that British politicians are still the perfect combination of arrogant and stupid enough to assume that couldn’t possibly be happening to them, not to the Great Britain, the US’ most important ally.
But yeah, at this point this is just a rambling treatise on a particular phenomenon of lower-end British political class.