You remember Dennis Miller, don’t you? He’s the comedian with the complex vocabulary who worked for a season as an analyst on ABC’s "Monday Night Football." Using Miller as a football analyst was probably the brainchild of the same guy who thought New Coke was a good idea. But give him his due — Miller is usually a funny, clever guy. During the last presidential campaign, he became a self-proclaimed pariah in liberal circles for his defense of George W. Bush and the Iraq War. So, it was with interest that I tuned into Miller’s latest HBO special from Las Vegas.
The "new" corporate Dennis Miller wears a business suit and tie during his standup routine. When was the last time you saw a comedian under 75 wearing a suit and tie on stage? Maybe George Burns? Miller still sports his trademark scruffy beard, but it seems a holdover from his distant past, something he would gladly shave if only the right corporate sponsor would come along.
Let’s sympathize with Miller. These days, it’s really tough doing a monologue touching on the political scene when you don’t want to offend the GOP and, minutes into his shtick, you realize Miller isn’t going to say anything remotely critical of a Republican. This is an especially difficult trick when it’s the Republicans who are running this mess in Washington and there’s plenty of fodder, but Miller gamely tries to pull it off. So we get Miller ridiculing Democrats — the ridiculous Sen. Robert Byrd from West Virginia — and he gets off a few obligatory jokes about Byrd’s age and his KKK affiliation about, what, 100 years ago? Miller finds Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid terribly boring (wow, that’s insightful) and wraps it up with a crack about Bill Clinton’s infidelities. You keep waiting in vain for some mention of Tom DeLay’s indictment or the pomposity of Bill Frist. Nothing. The name Scooter Libby is never mentioned. No jokes about Dick Cheney’s ties to Haliburton. It’s as if the last six years have never happened. If you were a visiting space alien, you would think it was still the heyday of the Clinton Administration, but Bubba hasn’t been calling the shots for a long time. Picking on the pathetic, politically weak Democrats is like kicking a homeless person.
Sure Miller throws in a few positives for the other side — Bill Clinton is smart, John Kerry’s Vietnam service is honorable (no swift-boating here), but Miller says he voted for Bush in the last election because Kerry is too deliberate, like a chess player, and Dubya has the ability of a gambling "checkers" player. Strange. In the last election, the Iraq invasion was already under a suspicious cloud of wrong assumptions, so maybe a deliberate approach would have been needed. But Miller never challenges his own assumptions — just like his faux cowboy hero. When it comes to the environment, Miller reveals himself to be in league with the corporate audiences he apparently now courts.
Alaska? Miller prefers Vegas (the site of his HBO show). Who needs pristine wilderness? Alaska is a joke. Rape the land and steal the oil is Miller’s solution as he ridicules alternate fuel sources.
Somebody better update Dennis. Since Bush’s recent State of the Union, oil is bad and alternate sources are good. Miller doesn’t believe in global warming because he doubts the thermometers were working correctly in the 1700s. No comedy in the fact that the Administration has just been accused by one of its top scientists of preventing him from speaking out on real evidence of global warming.
Miller is even more to the point about the Iraqis, "F— the Iraqis." No pretense here of helping Iraq become a democracy. Miller derides their so-called art treasures and culture in a bit of Ugly Americanism that so endears us to the rest of the world.
Miller not only denies democracy to the Iraqis, or at least is indifferent to it, but he denies it to Americans, as well. In one of his few "serious" moments on stage, he suggests if he were against the war, he would remain silent in deference to the troops. Is he suggesting we shouldn’t have criticized even the lack of proper body armor or the paltry compensation families get when one of their kids is booby trapped by a roadside bomb? This is "comedy" right out of the Bush Administration playbook. Clunky Bush spokesperson Scott McClelland with a hip veneer.
Miller is the kind of comedian that ought to be playing the White House on a regular basis. Hey, there is one running the White House.
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Tom Cardella will be in the Florida sun next week. His column will resume on Feb. 23.
