Comedy Central really makes me sad. They've put a new show on, a sorta Carson/Letterman/Leno sorta show, with D.L. Hughley as the host. Hughley is one of these generic black comedians, that uses all the same jokes as every other generic black comedian. My family so poor. Taxis don't stop for black people. Republicans is mean to black people.
What makes it really sad, though, is how transparently and flailingly CC and Hughley are trying to create “another John Stewart.” Hughley keeps mentioning the Daily Show and Jon Stewart in his promos. Then he ham-fistedly tries to work in all sorts of attacks on the Bush administration. His first set of guests were three white people, so he jests that his new black comedy is kicking off with “a set of guests as white as George Bush's last birthday party.” Now, for me, the first thing that pops into mind upon hearing that is “Condoleeza Rice,” followed closely by “Alberto Gonzalez,” and then, I suppose, “Clarence Thomas.” But that's just me, right? Hughley doesn't know who those people are... Wrong. Not only did he do a joke about Thomas, but he did an entire segment on Rice's hairstyle, and how no black woman in the world but Rice wears it. Conclusion? Rice isn't really black...
It's just amazingly amazing how many layers of liberal bullshit the man stacks up. I saw two shows. One set of guests were three random white people I don't really even know or care about. Hughley starts out by laying into Bill Cosby, who he apparently thinks is boorish and domineering, based upon his comments about black culture. He really objects to Cosby, and rather than really engage what Cosby says, he and the idiot guests all jibber about how Cosby must be bored or something... They then go on to jabber mindlessly about Karl Rove. They can't really say what he did, or name any real details, they just know he's bad, and he's not to be trusted. It's some of the most unbelievably shallow liberalism one can imagine.
The next show also had three guests, one of which was black director John Singleton, one was Stewart Black, of the Daily Show, and the last was some idiot who works on The West Wing. Black. Daily Show. Liberal. Black. Daily Show. Liberal. That's the formula. Hammer on it. That's literally the level that Comedy Central is at. Jon Stewart is a huge liberal, and he's very popular. Let's make a black Jon Stewart! Maybe if we put Stewart Black next to him, people will think he's Jon Stewart! Yaaaay! Seriously, how insane is that? Jon Stewart. Stewart Black. Black D.L. Hughley. Stewart. Stewart. Black. Black. Stewart. Liberal. Black. Stewart. Even the WORDS are the same.
All of this brings me to Thomas Sowell, who, if D.L. Hughley was actually literate, would no doubt really hate. Sowell is one of these black scholars, who has the audacity to suggest that slavery and white people aren't the sole causes for black social dysfunction. I have been reading his most recent book, Black Rednecks & White Liberals, from which I glean two main points: First, many black people have inherited “redneck” culture from the southern whites amongst whom they lived as slaves, a culture which has it roots on the British Isles, which followed immigrants across the Atlantic, and which created a population of brash, aggressive, shiftless and ignorant people in the American colonies. From there, Sowell goes on to show how this culture has repeatedly damaged the progress of black people, and he then transitions into the second main point, which is that White Liberals, and their ill-informed, guilt-driven “indiscriminate charity” have done more to hurt black people than help. Welfare, for example, provides a sufficient support to allow black people to continue to live in an inferior redneck culture, which simply wouldn't be sustainable otherwise.
The contrast between Hughley and Sowell is very stark, and very disconcerting. To watch Hughley systematically attack Bill Cosby for calling on blacks to leave redneck culture behind is depressing. The same must be said of his attempts to discredit and disavow Condoleeza Rice. If Hughley really is the “black Jon Stewart,” aka. the “black Mainstream Liberal voice” it's pushing me back towards a suspicion I've had for some time: at some level, the Democratic party is actively seeking to perpetuate black poverty, so as to maintain a sizeable and guaranteed voting block. It's very clear that indiscriminate charity on the part of white liberals has immeasurably harmed American blacks over the years. But watching Hughley's calculated assault on black success, I have to wonder if that charity was really so indiscriminate. Maybe Robert Byrd knows the answer to that question...