I found myself watching Jay Leno the other night. By and large, I’ve given up TV, don’t have cable and watch the box maybe once every couple of weeks or so (usually at the boyfriend’s). But it was late, I couldn’t sleep, so I found myself watching the cheesiest, crudest, lowest-common-denominator humor I’ve seen in a long while. It had Dolly Parton in the same joke as a couple of melons, for Pete’s sake. And that was a high point. But I still watched it over Letterman. The NYT today tries to explain why Leno is now so dominant. It’s relatively easy, I think: Leno is a conservative voice in an unsettled time. His hackneyed humor and old-as-the-hills jokes, and non-confrontational suck-ups with Hollywood-approved celebs are more comforting than Letterman’s snarling irony. More to the point: IRONY IS DEAD. It died years ago – even before 9/11. Letterman, much as I admire him, is a relic. It’s over, Dave. Over.
THE LEFT AND ANTI-SEMITISM: The latest example: a story in the left-wing Scottish paper, the Sunday Herald, implicating Israelis in the 9/11 attacks. This is not a fringe paper. Money quote:
THERE was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.
Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.
Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.
It really is happening again. (While on the subject, check out Natan Sharansky’s take on anti-Semitism in the new Commentary.)
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Whatever happened to the gender gap? I’ve always thought of my sister as a classic Democrat. Pro-abortion, actually cares about the poor and thinks that government aid is a good thing (Ah!) Voted for Clinton twice.
Problem for the Democrats is that she used to work on the 102nd floor of the World Trade center (North-south-I forget-It doesn’t matter, really-no one made it down from either) She left that job in 2000, but a lot of her friends and coworkers didn’t.
Needless to say, I haven’t heard her complain once about Bush, and definitely said “Thank God Gore lost”
She left her six-figure job to become a teacher (classic idealism). She discovered that the Democratic education machine seems to value bureaucratic jobs a lot more than results. When Edison took over her Philadelphia school, she was all for it.
I think she will vote Republican this time. I don’t know if its a national trend, but it may explain some of these numbers.”
The Dish 