Tom McGee's Blog

Colbert just had a wickedly good segment with the author of the new book, “Talking Right,” riffing on the sound-bite-cum-slogans that substitute for real dialog today. Much of this comes from the right — flip-flop, cut and run, support the troops, death tax, stay the course. All by design take subtle and complicated ideas and reduce them to the most inane and oversimplified — please don’t let me say “essence” — more like an anti-essence that negates any real meaning.

It’s almost as though back in school, while the rest of us were reading “1984″ and thinking how terrible it could be, there was this whole group of people who were thinking “yeah, this could work!”

Last week I rented “V for Vendetta.” I was rather disappointed. While it set up a really timely and potentially hard-hitting premise of a religious fundamentalist leader staging a fake terrorist attack to take political power, it pulled its punches too much and instead opted for the usual pointless action-movie plot devices.

So say it with me … “no more slogans! no more slogans! no more slogans!”