Liberal Forum

jayjay » 13 Oct 2014 3:57 am » wrote:Good OP. However, another thing to consider:

Credible conservatism went out with the Nixon era--but I personally believe TV to be the biggest culprit, for reasons I think should be obvious.r

I don't think it's coming back. Quite the contrary--in fact it's an increasing problem not only at the federal level but also in local elections (thanks for that, too, SCOTUS).

Yes, our rejection of conservatism was cheered by the television - by the programming and especially by the commercials.I remember looking at M.A.S.H. as rather offensively ham-handed propaganda. Hawk Eye and BJ always got the clever lines and the moral lines - whereas Frank Burn and Hotlips Houlihan never had a sympathetic scene. Burns was a weak, sniveling, hypccritical fraud with an enormous sense of entitlement. As I gained experience of the world, I was astounded to find that the producers of M.A.S.H. were not so much striving to be propagandists as they were emulating documentarians, The Frank Burns character, which I had naively seen as a bad compendium of worse ideas was, in fact, a brilliant and extremely accurate character study of the average neoconservative.