I can has freedoms?: Fox & Friends need to go to a Kaplan comedy seminar

Okay, this may be the least important subject anyone has discussed on this blog since I’ve been here (and yes, I’m counting Rupert’s posts about wanting to doink Lara Logan), but I had to write something about those doctored photos on Fox & Friends. You know, the ones that make those New York Times writers look like puppets in the Land of Confusion music video:

Here are the pictures:
Okay, so even without the actual photos for comparison, it’s obvious the photos are doctored: Reddicliffe has smears running down his forehead and Steinberg’s chin is the size of a Coke can. Anyone with half a brain can see it, but then we are talking about people who watch Fox News so who knows how many thousands were fooled?
But did Fox & Friends set out to deceive people? I don’t think so. I don’t think Rupert Murdoch’s grand schemes for world domination hinge on convincing the public that New York Times writers look like characters from Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

I think it’s something far scarier. I think they though they were being funny.
Is it just me, or since The Daily Show got big have there been a lot more people in the media and politics trying to be Jon Stewart and utterly, utterly, utterly failing. They tell jokes that you’re not even completely sure are supposed to be jokes, except there’s no other plausible explanation for why someone would say it, like McCain’s wife-beating rib-tickler that I posted about recently. Or Bernie Goldberg’s “I got some bad news before I came out; a guy from Newsweek called and said that Al Franken had flushed [my] book down the toilet.” Zing! Or Ann Coulter’s “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' crème brulee. That's just a joke, for you in the media.” Nice save with the clarification at the end, Ann. You wouldn’t want someone to take that out of context and make you look crass.
Actually, maybe I should lay off Ann. You see, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that she’s not really the horrible human being she appears to be, and is, in fact, a Sacha Baron Cohen character.

I think Cohen has a crack team of makeup wizards do him up in the morning, he does the cable news rounds, and a few years from now they’ll edit all of the footage together into a movie and it will be high-larious. I mean, what other plausible explanation is there for the shit she says? “If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine. Very niiiice!” “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building. High five!”

I seem to notice the not-funny jokes more on the right, but they’re certainly there in the center and the left, too. Every clip of Beat the Press I’ve ever seen has been painful. Keith Olbermann: stop it with the silly voices. Just fuckin’ knock it off. And Jeremiah Wright? Dude, what the fuck?! With the “white” voice and the Kennedy voice and the Brittish voice? What was the fucking point of that, besides proving to America that you’re the poor man’s Robin Williams:

But at least there’s one media personality you can count on to be consistently hilarious, albeit unintentionally:

Here’s what Bill had to say about those doctored photos from Fox & Friends:

“And now for perhaps the most hypocritical situation we have ever seen…Fox & Friends poked a little fun at Steinberg for misrepreporting the situation, as he does all the time. And they used an unflattering characature of him. Well, some folks at The Times are outraged… Now this is rich, because here are the charicatures The New York Times used of me when they slashed my book, Culture Warrior… You notice the horn in there?!”

Here’s the image in question. You notice the horn in there?! Or, as most of us know it, the cartoon speech bubble?!

Okay, just off the top of your head, what’s the big difference between the two sets of charactitures that make them completely different animals. That’s right! The New York Times doctored Bill’s photos so heavily that the end product looks like a hand-drawn illustration! Those bastards!
Actually, I think Cartoon O’Reilly is a much more accurate likeness than Photoshop Steinberg. See?: