Dennis Miller: unfunny GOP hack

When I think about the 2008 election and all of its implications, my biggest worry about the Democrats' seemingly bottomless capacity to shoot themselves in the foot can be summed up in two words: Harry Reid.

What a disaster Reid has been for the Democrats, who surely must be ruing the day that they ever elected him to be Senate Majority Leader. Sitting through a session of the U.S. Senate with the current leadership must be a lot like sitting through a student council meeting in junior high - lots of complaining, but nothing gets done.

Having said that, nobody screws up a valid political point like Dennis Miller. Is there anyone less funny than Dennis Miller right now? He appears weekly on Fersatz News' Half Hour News Hour to deliver a 2-3 minute rant. Unlike his former HBO show, Dennis Miller Live, Half Hour is the worst bore in the history of television. As I've previously written, it's so bad I hope Fox sticks with it. By the way, has a show ever been more appropriately named than this one? After watching two episodes in their entirety (cue canned applause track, just like the show), my first thought was, "What a great name - this show sucked so bad, the half hour really did feel like an hour."

Anyway, Miller's rants aren't like his old rants on his HBO show, where he's start off with, "Now I don't want to get off on a rant here..." These are much worse than that. For instance, in the clip above, it takes Miller nearly two-and-a-half minutes to say what I can say in five seconds:

Harry Reid is an incompetent pussy.

Instead, Miller takes us through a verbal tour of his dictionary, thesaurus and laundry list of non sequiturs. Just awful. But, I'm not surprised - only a hack like Miller could screw up what should have been his dream job - color commentary on Monday Night Football. In a 2006 ESPN SportsCenter poll, Miller was once voted the worst color commentator in MNF history. No doubt only because he beat out Rush Limbaugh for the job in 2000.

What's more, you know that Miller sucked when conservative blogs were flogging his Reid rant as "the most devastating take-down in political history." Maybe to people with an attention span of three months. I can think of many more that were better.

Right off the top of my head comes then-vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, famously telling Dan Quayle, "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

An even better one is from a recent issue of Rolling Stone, when my favorite Republican candidate, Rudy Giuliani, gets gangsta slapped in a piece by Matt Taibbi entitled Giuliani: Worse than Bush. An excerpt:

Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days — like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

. . .

Like Bush's, Rudy's career before the bombing was in the toilet; New Yorkers had come to think of him as an ambition-sick meanie whose personal scandals were truly wearying to think about. But on the day of the attack, it must be admitted, Rudy hit the perfect note; he displayed all the strength and reassuring calm that Bush did not, and for one day at least, he was everything you'd want in a leader. Then he woke up the next day and the opportunist in him saw that there was money to be made in an America high on fear.

For starters, Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He’s traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the "WTC cough." This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy's 9/11 hero image — the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. While the cleanup effort at the Pentagon was turned over to federal agencies like OSHA, which quickly sealed off the site and required relief workers to wear hazmat [sic] suits, the World Trade Center cleanup was handed over to Giuliani. The city's Department of Design and Construction (DDC) promptly farmed out the waste-clearing effort to a smattering of politically connected companies, including Bechtel, Bovis and AMEC construction.

. . .

Did Giuliani know the air at the World Trade Center was poison? Who knows — but we do know he took over the cleanup, refusing to let more experienced federal agencies run the show. He stood on a few brick piles on the day of the bombing, then spent the next ten months making damn sure everyone worked the night shift on-site while he bonked his mistress and negotiated his gazillion-dollar move to the private sector. Meanwhile, the people who actually cleaned up the rubble got used to checking their stool for blood every morning.

Now Giuliani is running for president — as the hero of 9/11. George Bush has balls, too, but even he has to bow to this motherfucker.

Now that's what I call a Dan Gable-like political take down.

In fact, it's the best beat down of Giuliani I've read yet. And, most incoveniently for America's Mayor, it's true.

Anyway, back to my original point: Dennis Miller is a talentless hack who can't hold down a steady job in TV on any network besides Fox Noise Channel. He's like Sean Hannity with jokes. Now THAT'S funny.

Hmm. That took about 15 seconds, and not one esoteric reference.

Miller's right about one thing, though - Harry Reid is a pussy. He just doesn't need to take so long to say it in his stupid and humorless way.