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Arianna Huffington and Harry Shearer

cable guys

Posted Saturday, May 30, 1998, at 1:47 PM ET

First of all, how hard are Chris Matthews' balls? Secondly, how can Clinton disappoint anybody who really paid attention to his campaigns? He's given us a relentlessly centrist administration, and that's what his DLC always said we wanted. I haven't seen Bulworth yet, but, in the great tradition of talk TV, that didn't prevent me from answering questions based on it. The film sounds like an amusing fantasy, but it IS a fantasy that all the "people"--didn't the failure of Marxism send that word into the dustbin of history?--want is the truth from their politicians. We want reassuring lies, which is why they supply them in such plenitude, lies like "You can have lower taxes and better (roads, schools, hospitals, you name it)." Do we want our religious leaders to say, "Hey, these are reassuring moral fables, but don't make the mistake of taking these stories literally?" Do we want our media to say, "Stay tuned for more meretricious crap, right after these messages from people who underestimate your intelligence almost as much as we do?"
Yeah, right.

cable guys

Posted Saturday, May 30, 1998, at 1:47 PM ET
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Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist. Harry Shearer is host of radio's Le Show, a screenwriter, an actor, and provider of several voices on The Simpsons.
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