She is a very, smart, ballsy woman with very original ideas, a clear understanding of history and does not suffer fools.
This is an excellent interview. There are so many clever thoughts articulated in this piece that I am going to read it a few more times because I don't want to miss anything.
Read the whole thing.
Some choice nuggets:
“Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted
imagination.” It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has
something to do with their parents– they’re still sneering at dad in
some way....All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs
regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more
profound than anything that liberalism has produced. We have a whole
generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to
politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system. They see
nothing but politics, but politics is tiny. Politics applies only to
society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves the
eternal principles of life and death."
On "snark atheism" (brilliant):
"I despise snark. Snark is a disease that started with David Letterman
and jumped to Jon Stewart and has proliferated since. I think it’s
horrible for young people! And this kind of snark atheism–let’s just
invent that term right now–is stupid, and people who act like that are
stupid."
On comedy (also brilliant):
"Comedy, to me, is one of the major modern genres, and the big influences
on my generation were Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. Then Joan Rivers had
an enormous impact on me–she’s one of my major role models. It’s the
old caustic, confrontational style of Jewish comedy."
"It was Jewish
comedians who turned stand-up from the old gag-meister shtick of
vaudeville into a biting analysis of current social issues, and they
really pushed the envelope. Lenny Bruce used stand-up to produce gasps
and silence from the audience. And that’s my standard–a comedy of
personal risk"
I think that's the best definition of stand-up comedy, and possibly comedy in general, that I've ever seen.
And then a bit about her media reads (very similar to mine actually, but I usually cannot stomach Salon). This is how a reasonable, intelligent, well-informed person gets information, along with reading books of course.
I like her style:
"The first thing I always turn to is the Drudge Report, which I’ve done around the clock since the birth of that page... I admire the mix on Drudge of all types of news stories, high and
low."
"The reason that nobody has been able to imitate Drudge is because
he’s an auteur, stamping the page with his own unique sensibility and
instincts. It must be exhausting, because he must constantly filter
world news on a daily basis. He’s simply an aggregator, not a news
source, but he has an amazing sense of collage. '
"The page is fluid and
always in motion, and Drudge is full of jokes and mischief."
"So I
begin with that, and then I check the New York Post, the New York Times,
Salon.com, Lucianne.com, and Arts & Letters Daily. The Washington
Post online is far more ideologically diverse than the printed newspaper
ever was. I’ll look at British papers of opposing sides, like The
Guardian and The Telegraph, and I’m a big fan of the tabloid Daily
Mail. I like Google News a lot–I can type in a topic like “Hillary” and
get a whole range of articles, both liberal and conservative, including
on obscure fringe web sites."
"I think it’s an absolute civic obligation
for people to at least briefly review the full political spectrum of
viewpoints on any major issue."
