In place of News, there’s still Gutfeld…

Since the ascendancy of Bobby Kennedy at HHS, health has become a hot-button issue on both sides of the aisle. Actual events and results are not immediate in this realm, which is why the alignments of political operatives tend to be rhetorical, polemical, and overstated in the absence of just about everything else you can put on TV. Conservatives are suddenly more publicly concerned about health and what’s hurting it than they’ve ever been, and lefties are applying their old playbook strategy of accusing MAGA of bias and bad faith while resurrecting old chestnuts intended to prove how much they’ve always cared about health. Just this week I’ve seen the same ad a half dozen times reminding us deplorables about how bad smoking is and how culpable evil capitalist companies have been in promoting it. We’re told to join the class action population of smokers now dying who have just discovered that cigarettes are to blame.

Dreary stuff. Which is the time when Greg Gutfeld usually weighs in with something funny and common-sensical to say about it all. Here’s his latest, from yesterday:

The 3-minute warmup is so-so, the next 5 minutes are great.

I have two collateral inputs for you that you may or may not regard as relevant.

My slighting reference to the warmup is acknowledgment that I am not Gutfeld’s biggest fan. The other day I posted a link to a stream of posts from Instapunk Rules. By coincidence it contained an assessment of Gutfeld’s appeal that has since been proven wrong. 

Here’s the whole post, including the Comments.

I tend to boast of my accurate predictions. With good reason, I think. I predicted long before his run at it that Romney would never be President. I predicted that the Obama presidency would be a disaster the day after his election in 2008. I said he would be so bad that he’s make it impossible to elect another black president for a generation. I’ve been right about a lot of things over the years, but I was wrong about Gutfeld. He is now the Number 1 host of late night talk shows, besting (or nearly so) the collective ratings of Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, and Meyers, who — along with lefty bedfellow Jon Stewart — have given up telling jokes that don’t end with the punchline”Donald Trump.”

A longtime reader of my posts called me on my premature obit of Gutfeld at the time. She’s a lovely woman from Hawaii, sometimes caustic but always passionate in her convictions. I responded (the Wordpress SW made me ‘Anonymous’), and she came back with a closing retort. That’s how things used to work in the good old days before Uncle Joe. And she was right. His career was far from over.

But I believe my reaction to Gutfeld at the time went a little deeper than Red Eye and grinning Greg. My suspicion was that he was more interested in getting laughs than providing the political insight his employment at Fox News would seem to imply. There are still times when it seems he’ll say anything to get a guffaw (e.g., his Gere-gerbil joke in the warmup above), although he does seem more sharply and satirically focused than he used to be. Which I admire.

All of which matters only because it explains the rationale for my closing bit of collateral evidence. Again by coincidence, the Gutfeld clip also included a Colbert-related clip in the usual YT sidebar. This is where the late-night hosts are all exposed as continual flirts with hypocrisy. They say they care about the topics they prosecute, but do they care as much about the topics as the ratings? To quote, the Fox News Channel of old, “You decide.”