I consider myself a center left person with the emphasis on center. In fact there is much about the extreme, purist left that I find no better than the extreme right. On balance, however, it is the worst kind of false equivalence to think that comedians who make fun of the extreme right’s lies, conspiracy theories and xenophobia is being grossly unfair.

The problem has little to do with centrists or leftist or left leaning comedians but rather with Roger Ailes and the toxic right wing-wing media empire he put into play in the mid 90s because he understood that playing to the dark side of the tribal impulse (the “other”) could be exploited for big bucks.

It is not the progressive’s fault if the rubes, yes I did say rubes, suck up the other-world view of Fox and friends and crazy right-wing talk radio, a view that works against them most of all, but they just can’t seem to resist it because of their own base bigotry.

Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News, made million off of convincing ordinary folks that there was a leftist elite (pinheads) that hated them and was out to get them when in reality these were the very sort of folks who had fought for social security and medicare and the institutional rules and regulations that inhibited the rich and powerful from running over average citizens.