Episode Review: Samantha Bee at the Top of Her Game
In the May 16th episode of Full Frontal, host Samantha Bee gave us three very entertaining looks at what are actually serious subjects. It was one of the best episodes of the show I have seen.
In her first segment, she used her crocodile-teared farewell to Ted Cruz (although you might well wonder how even a reactionary crocodile could weep over his departure) to get into the subject of how evangelical Christians came to be such stalwarts of the Republican Party. The tie-in was that Cruz had expected to wow the evangelicals in Wisconsin and, thereby, win the primary. Instead, they voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, who is what many of those true believers would ordinarily consider a Mouth Christian—perhaps the most populous branch of Christianity today. Certainly Mr. Trump’s lifestyle had not been congruent with his professed love of the Bible.
After remarking on the surprising nature of this development, Ms. Bee went on to examine the roots of the alliance between fundamentalism and Republicanism. She correctly pointed out that, after some major setbacks, earlier in the twentieth century, hard-core Christians decided to turn their backs on politics, and, for a long time, they did. What she might have added, had time and her research staff permitted, was that, prior to those aforementioned setbacks, the fundamentalists were among the populists, not the Save Our Hedge Fund Managers crowd. William Jennings Bryan, the father and hero of the populist movement, was a Bible-thumping evangelical. It was he who led the prosecution team in the Scopes Trial of 1935. Google it, if you must, I need to keep moving on. As for Prohibition, Eleanor Roosevelt was a confirmed “dry,” yet you would be hard-pressed to find a more progressive person throughout her time as First Lady and beyond.
Ms. Bee then made the interesting point that, while a Supreme Court case did more than anything else to galvanize the evangelical Christians into political action, it was not Roe v. Wade, as we might imagine at first thought. To find out which straw broke the dromedary’s back, you will need to catch the re-broadcast or check out what the ubiquitous, nameless construction foreman on Futurama would call Youse Tubes.
Following that bit, there was an entertaining piece about the forgotten victims of super PACs. She covered most of it in an interview with one of the most aggrieved victims. Where she is often deadly sarcastic (and rightly so) in her one-on-one interviews, she showed a proper measure of gentility in this one.
The next segment dealt with misogyny. It is really appalling when you consider the vitriol that outspoken women are subjected to, especially in this time of easy, instant and anonymous communication. Back in the 1920s, a wit like H.L. Menken could quip that a misogynist was a man who hated women as much as women hated each other. These days, there is no basis whatsoever for such a remark, even if malicious gossip has not abated. Compared to the political hatred some women undergo, it is nothing.
After giving several shorter examples of this trend (some of them with her as the target), Ms. Bee then devoted the rest of the segment to one specific and distressing example. You can check it out on the link below. The “players” in that link come back for an amusing encore at the end of the show.
Let me open wide the door to the Department of Redundancy Department and say, catch this show if you haven’t already.
Full Frontal, TBS, May 16, 2016
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Thomas Cleveland Lane
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