Some Comments on Gutfeld

Greg Gutfeld is an interesting character.  He is a commentator on the Fox News Channel, hosting his own show called Red Eye as well as appearing regularly on their The Five, which appropriately comes on at 5 PM weekday afternoons. Politically, he is staunchly in the camp of the conservative Republicans, venting much of his righteous wrath with angry-sounding tirades against Obama and Obamacare. In spite of this, though, I get the impression that it's all a mischievous, fun game to him.  Sometimes I agree with him and sometimes I don't.  One issue that I'm on Gutfeld's side about is the suffocating degree of political correctness regarding what you can't say if you don't want to be accused of being a "hater" (read my recent article about two politically incorrect words).  In this he is also, like me, sensitive to the double standard I see where it's apparently O.K. to trash practicing Christians but it's bigotry and hate if you say anything critical about Islam.  I say let all the criticism flow freely about any faith and its practitioners ...and put it all out there on the table for discussion.

Greg Gutfeld is funny and makes me smile, even when he is off on one of his anti-Obama rants (I tend to be more supportive of the President). His show Red Eye, though, makes little sense to me with all of the nauseatingly silly, giggling guests sitting around the table trying to sound witty.  They aren't witty.  No, Gutfeld's best show is definitely The Five.  But he said something the other day on it that I have to take issue with: his contention that the Republicans are better on civil rights because they were the party of Lincoln and they freed the slaves and brought about Reconstruction. That may have been true from the time that the Republican party was formed in 1854 until the great financial crisis rocking this country in 1873...when they essentially decided to abandon Reconstruction and the rights of freed blacks in the South and instead became the party of the wealthy and big business.  They stacked the U.S. Supreme Court with justices who took the crucial Fourteenth Amendment that would grant equal rights to blacks and allowed individual states to apply it as they saw fit by drastically restricting its application to cases strictly involving interstate activity.  Instead, incredibly, they then applied the due process clause contained within that amendment to protect big business in case after case that they heard for a period spanning decades.  And of course the Republicans were only too happy to abandon Reconstruction and their "Radical" label in 1876 when, after stealing that year's presidential election between their guy Rutherford Hayes and the real winner Samuel Tilden, they played the card of withdrawing federal troops enforcing Reconstruction from the South to appease southern states that had voted for Tilden in the election but whose electoral votes had been handed over to Hayes. 

But that's all pretty old history, anyway, as far as I can see it. I like to think that, on some issues at least, people in general have become more enlightened.  I think things with race are better than they were, but I also think we still have a long, long way to go.   But Gutfeld's historical take on it leaves something to be desired.  Those pro-segregationist white Southern Democrats he speaks of who opposed civil rights for blacks for decades went over in droves to the Republican Party in the 1970s and 1980s. So with this flip-flop regarding parties, it is pointless to go back in history and try to credit your political party now for something that happened in the distant past.
   
Greg Gutfeld has a new book out now titled Not Cool, which I am currently in the process of reading.  More on this later...