Cheap Seats 2024 By Rich Trzupek

Twit of the Year, 2024 - 02/28

By Rich Trzupek
   John Oliver, who is marketed as a humorist and pundit, recently offered Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas $1 million if he would resign his position on the court. Personally I found this offer a couple of orders of magnitude less funny than when Lorne Michaels offered The Beatles $100 to appear in an impromptu reunion on Saturday Night Live in the early days of the show. (Side note: Paul and John were actually watching that episode and contemplated driving over to collect the check but ultimately decided not. True story).
  Anyway let’s break Oliver’s offer down a bit. In the current Supreme Court there are six right leaning judges and three left-leaning judges. If one is going to attempt to alter that balance by inducing someone on the right to resign who would you pick? And yes, I completely understand that Oliver’s bribe was not offered seriously in any way. It was a joke or something pretending to be a joke. Whatever. It’s not important to consider the supposed bribe, but to examine the target of a pretty lame joke.
  How to pick a worthy target? Barrett or Kavanaugh might make good cannon fodder. Both are young, probably not as well financially established as the rest and, having been appointed by Orange Man, more inclined to be stained by that association. Roberts is a great target too. He sways more to the middle than any of the six. Plus he is the Supreme of the Supremes.
  In that context, going after Alito, Gorsuch or Thomas is something different. All three are SCOTUS vets, strict constructionists with no ties to Bush the Younger or Bad Orange Man.  They are the old folks on the court, most vulnerable to “hey boomer” attacks.  
  Of the three targets for sniggering, Oliver chose Thomas. Perhaps that’s a coincidence. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s the latest example of British liberal smuggery. I’m inclined to pick the letter.
  British liberal smuggery has a long history. Prior to World War 2 the basic theme was “we are bullies trying to run the world. We have exploited and diminished those living in our colonies. We have forced our views down the throats of gentle indigenous people whose traditions are peaceful and at one with nature.”  The fact that many (not all) of these native cultures saw nothing wrong with eating their enemies or capturing them and selling them into slavery wasn’t worthy of mention. The smug British lib of the time was laser-focused on taking down the Tories, and if inventing a sob story helped make that happen, why the hell not?
  Post World War 2 the smug British liberal message modified, just a tad. It became “see how much we screwed up the world by our incapability of running anything when we were in charge. Thank Gaia we’re not in charge any more! Let’s do penance to make up for our sins.”
  The former stance ignores the enormous contributions that Brits like John Locke, William Wilberforce, William Gladstone, and Winston Churchill made to enlighten and ennoble society. It also ignores the enormous damage that nitwits like James Callaghan end Ramsey McDonald inflicted on The United Kingdom.
  The latter stance posits that conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan and troubles involved in handing over capitalist Hong Kong to communist China were not at all problematic and did not at all deserve western attention. Quite the opposite for the modern smug British liberal. Such issues were not worthy of their attention, but they were the inevitable result of British mismanagement. It’s the classic case of the rebellious adolescent who spends years ignoring and defying her parents, then when the wheels come off – as they inevitably do – and she finds herself in deep trouble, she blames here parents for mismanagement.
  One cannot help but wonder how many millennials and younger can identify who John Locke or William Wilberforce were, and why they are so important to our world. I doubt that number exceeds 10%. That’s tragic. If you don’t know where you’ve been how can you possibly chart a course for where you intend to go?
  Back to Oliver. I have made it a matter of policy and practice to never refer to the color of the skin or the claimed race of any public figure I choose to write about in the public sphere.  I’m sticking with that. If John Oliver chooses to defend his targeted attack on Justice Thomas for some reason, I hope he will kind enough to share that reasoning with the rest of us. While I believe Oliver is much more twit than troll, it’s not hard to imagine the word “wog” drifted through his head as he contemplated which member of SCOTUS to mock.
  Liberal Brit snobs like Oliver remain incensed that Brexit happened. They lament how much better Britain would be if they paid appropriate homage to Brussels and Berlin. They don’t know their own history. They don’t understand that what made the UK overwhelmingly a net force for good in the world is that the nation and its leaders had no interest in being part of the cool kids club on the continent. Britain provided – however imperfectly – the essential function of freely implementing checks and balances when the teaming, creative and destructive forces of mainland Europe erupted in conflicts, both theoretical and actual.
  Oliver is the more dangerous sort of modern British liberal. If you read The Guardian, there’s no doubt where they’re coming from. I don’t agree with the majority of what I read there, but I’m also sure they have no interest in hiding their bias/perspective. Like many others, Oliver is quite the opposite. Call him out on something he said that is obviously wrong, and he’ll retreat behind the “can’t you take a joke?” defense. Like most twits, he tries to be a bully, and like all bullies, he’s a coward.
  E-mail: Richtrzupek@gmail.com