When the latest installment of Saturday Night Live parodied Friday's presidential debate, the NBC comedy program gave attention to Barack Obama’s connections to convicted criminal Tony Rezko, corrupt Chicago politics, and Obama’s recent attempts at "playing the race card," which notably are all matters that the mainstream news media have given little attention to. While the show also took a number of shots at John McCain, several times having him propose a bizarre gimmick like challenging Obama to a pie-eating contest for example, the Illinois Senator also received several noteworthy jabs. One line involved McCain's character, played by Darrell Hammond, referring to Obama, played by Fred Armisen, as making an earmark request titled "Tony Rezko Hush Money." Obama's character also bragged that his tax cut plan would benefit Chicago politicians and city employees "because my plan would not tax income from bribes, kickbacks, shakedowns, embezzlement of government funds, or extortion."
For more on Rezko, scroll down one post.
Hats off to SNL for bringing Obama's ties to Illinois' corrupt political culture into the public eye, which the mainstream media for the most part is afraid to do.
I have to look back to, well, today, for an example. Jake Coyle of Associated Press writes about Tina Fey reprising her Sarah Palin character, and while he discussed the debate sketch, Coyle just ran out of space I guess and was unable to mention the Chicago corruption references in his article. But he found room for the offer made by McCain's character to challenge Obama to "'nude or seminude' town hall meetings."
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4 comments:
Commentators have got to start recording SNL. Last week all I heard was how evil SNL was for the Todd Palin bit. I've watched both weeks and in truth, SNL IS going after the MSM, fangs out. This week's bit specifically metioned threatening to use use of City of Chicago building inspectors retaliating against Obama detractors. Flippin hillarious!
Years ago, when Howard Stern started his saturday show to compete against SNL. He called the venerable show "Saturday Night Dead." He was right, in my opinion, but of course Stern's show was worse.
That being said, you are right. Until at least 11/4.
NBC took down all the YouTube clips from last night.
The only part of SNL worth watching last night was Tina Fey's nearly perfect impersonation of Sarah Palin. However, it wasn't actually funny because it was too close to reality. Particularly when she responded to questions by stringing words together that made no sense. It was way too reminiscent of Palin's actual interview with Katie Couric. Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker pointed out Palin's tendency to use a lot of words to say nothing in her recent article calling for Palin to step aside where she wrote:
"Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: 'Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.'
When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: 'I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?' If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself."
Although Fey has her down pat, it is difficult to laugh at the prospect of someone that vacuous being anywhere near the Presidency. Fortunately, after the bizarre conduct of the McCain campaign this past week and the precipitous drop in his poll numbers, it looks like Fey will get her wish and never have to impersonate Palin again after November 4th.
I don't think you can give much credit to SNL, they make jokes and exaggerate different aspects of everything. I don't think they mentioned much about Obama's view on background checks, but I'm willing to bet SNL didn't think of it.
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