If you chance to like this sort of thing, then this is undoubtedly the sort of thing you will like. It certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are—and who can doubt it?—cool enough to “get” the joke. What you will not find, in any of this output, is anything remotely “satirical” about the pulpit of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or any straight-faced, eyebrow-raising (and studio-audience-thigh-slap-triggering) mention of, say, The New York Times’s routine practice of captioning Al Sharpton as “the civil rights activist.” Baudelaire wrote that the devil’s greatest achievement was to have persuaded so many people that he doesn’t exist: liberal platitudinousness must be a bit like that to those who suffer from it without quite acknowledging that there is such a syndrome to begin with…

I noticed that both in Senator Franken’s Lies and in the Stewart team’s America, reference was made to Joseph Welch’s famous challenge to Joseph McCarthy about whether there was any “decency” left at last. In other encounters with the same faction and its followers, I have found that this is one of the “quotes” or “moments” from recent American history that they can be reliably counted upon to know. Two things seem to be involved here: an almost nostalgic realization that at one time the hard-right wing believed the entertainment industry was an enemy; and a desire to prove that it still is. The “American” symbols all over the album-size volumes reviewed here brilliantly dispel/preempt any charge of being unpatriotic.