S04.E01: Season Premiere

[Jamoche]

There are more books on those shelves than in the current “Old State Department Library” in DC: https://www.palmerreport.com/politics/donald-trump-fills-old-state-department-library-bookshelf-book/1215/

[Hanahope]

Oliver never said the two were equally bad.  He clearly showed Hillary as a raisin cookie and trump as a deluge of raisins.

[stillshimpy]

And then he took kind of a pasting about wasting all those raisins.   The raisins were meant to represent faults, areas for concern, ethical violations and Hillary had a cookies' worth of concern.  Then John dumped roughly six thousand raisins from the stage lights as representative of Trump's flaws. 

Edited February 14, 2017 by stillshimpy

[Quickbeam]

The Richard Gere urban myth focus really bugged me. Otherwise Oliver was as sharp as ever. Personally I think the show shines when doing explanatory bits ( like the medical debt or pay day loan pieces). I hope it isn't all Trump all the time going forward. 

[stillshimpy]

Oooo Canada, thank you.  Trudeau handily defeats the weird bullying thing that is the Trump handshake.   You know that's got to show up next week, right?  

[HawaiiTVGuy]

2 hours ago, LoneHaranguer said:

Trump may not kid around, but he uses metaphors, analogies, and hyperbole, none of which should be taken literally.

Except for the fact Thiel specifically mentioned ban and wall, and yet...here we are Thiel, are we not to take him literally still?  Hyperbole is one thing (I am not even going to dignify whatever Trump says ever as being metaphors or analogies because he has proven he has no idea what they are or how to properly use them in speeches) but to continually making blatantly false personal attack statements while continually discrediting fact-checkers is a huge threat to democracy.

[bilgistic]

12 hours ago, Kromm said:

The real tragedy of it all is that the WAY the purveyors of fake news have battled being fingered as fake news is to simply scream the phrase "fake news" at/about the REAL news outlets, thus creating a cycle where people who are wont to believe their point of view simply stop listening at all to anything which resembles evidence.

Yes! "Fake news" is not news that you disagree with; it's outright lies and misinformation published by non-legit/non-fact-based "sources". Calling a legitimate journalist "fake" doesn't make them so.

9 hours ago, iMonrey said:

That's my dad. He gets all his info from right-wing radio and if you try to counter him with provable facts he just thinks you're spewing a lot of liberal propaganda. The only "real" news is the hyperbole coming from Rush Limbaugh and his ilk because it reinforces his existing prejudices. Anything contradicting those beliefs is "fake." And people like that now have a President who thinks the same thing. That's what's scary. They all ran out and voted for this guy because think they - finally, someone is telling the "truth" as they know it.

Sis?

[ganesh]

53 minutes ago, HawaiiTVGuy said:

3 hours ago, LoneHaranguer said:

Trump may not kid around, but he uses metaphors, analogies, and hyperbole, none of which should be taken literally.

Except for the fact Thiel specifically mentioned ban and wall, and yet...here we are Thiel, are we not to take him literally still?  

There's a difference between saying "I going to create tons of jobs," and "I am calling to ban all muslims." There is your typical politics and what we've been seeing. Saying, "oh Trump doesn't actually mean a *wall*," and then having him say "I don't kid around" as Jon showed is alarming. Of course because of what he's saying, but hand-waving it is almost worse. 

[Snipsa]

I am not in the US, so I have to ask, did anybody see the ads on MSNBC, FOX or CNN? 

They were hilarious in the show, but would carry so much more weight/be even funnier, if they were actually allowed to be shown during the morning news shows...

Edited February 14, 2017 by Snipsa

[Brandi Maxxxx]

4 hours ago, Hanahope said:

Oliver never said the two were equally bad.  He clearly showed Hillary as a raisin cookie and trump as a deluge of raisins.

He was a bit too forgiving of the Swiss File Transfer if you ask me.

[DrScottie]

We are at full-blown truthiness, as Stephen Colbert called it, right now. The things you know in your gut are true, because you have told they are true from multiple sources all spouting that same message. Facts just don't resonate nearly as well. They don't provoke the emotional response needed to counteract the gut.  It's style over substance and style kicks substance's butt. 

[purist]

9 hours ago, stillshimpy said:

Last Week Tonight faces such a tough challenge:  How to fit all the horror that is 45 into a 30 min segment.

Indeed. Did you notice how fast Ollie was talking during the show? I thought, 'Wow. There's so much information to get across that he's having to talk WAY fast!'

[Hanahope]

12 hours ago, stillshimpy said:

Oooo Canada, thank you.  Trudeau handily defeats the weird bullying thing that is the Trump handshake.   You know that's got to show up next week, right?  

A family relative complained that i posted 'fake news' when i linked this on my facebook feed.   He said it was "fake" because it "suggested" that Trudeau rebuffed trump.  I said that the article said nothing of the sort, but rather just showed how Trudeau was prepared for trump's bullying handshake.  But my family member doesn't bother to read articles, just the headlines and pictures (in particular, the one with Trudeau looking kindof questioningly at trump's open hand when they were sitting for the photo op).  Another example of when a news article doesn't fit in with their "feelings" about trump, its "fake."

[Tara Ariano]

In case you missed it, here's the Previously.TV post on the episode!

Watch Last Week Tonight Attempt To Explain Donald Trump's Animosity Toward The Truth

Yes, InfoWars is in there.

[iMonrey]

Quote

Oliver never said the two were equally bad.

Not, but he spent a disproportionate amount of time on Clinton's "scandals" versus the time he devoted to the clown car that was Trump's campaign. Not saying he deliberately legitimized criticism of her, but like all the rest of the mainstream media, he more or less propped the idea there was something "there"  just by devoting time to it. There were like three or four things that kept dogging Clinton but with Trump it was a different shit show every single week - you could hardly keep up with it all. And the media was so terrified of looking biased or unbalanced they devoted equal time to both sides, which had the effect of hammering away again and again at Clinton's e-mails or Benghazi or the Clinton Foundation. Whereas with Trump it was always something different, so nothing ever really sunk in like it did with Clinton.

Quote

Or maybe they are all lost causes anyway.

I'm afraid that's the most likely scenario. The Democratic party cannot waste its time trying to reason with voters who thinks Trump speaks to the "truth" and everything that contradicts him is liberal propaganda. They would be better served shoring up support from the apathetic voters who were too un-enthused about Clinton or mad about Sanders to even vote on election day. 

[HawaiiTVGuy]

4 hours ago, Hanahope said:

A family relative complained that i posted 'fake news' when i linked this on my facebook feed.   He said it was "fake" because it "suggested" that Trudeau rebuffed trump.  I said that the article said nothing of the sort, but rather just showed how Trudeau was prepared for trump's bullying handshake.  But my family member doesn't bother to read articles, just the headlines and pictures (in particular, the one with Trudeau looking kindof questioningly at trump's open hand when they were sitting for the photo op).  Another example of when a news article doesn't fit in with their "feelings" about trump, its "fake."

Man, it still boggles my mind that Trumpers go the "fake news" to complain about news they don't agree with.  They really don't know what "fake news" is do they?  The whole Russian dossier thing was not "fake news" because the reports were that there were reports of the existence of a dossier.  NO ONE was saying that the contents of the dossier existed or was true, they were just saying that Trump and Obama WERE BRIEFED that there could be a dossier.  Next time Spicer or another surrogate says "fake news", if I am a reporter asking about the question, ask him specifically, WHAT DID WE JUST SAY IS FAKE?!  Corner them into trying to categorically deny stuff.

And it pisses me off that they are claiming the stuff is "fake news" when "real" "fake news" can be harmful and was peddled by anti-Clinton sites (ie sex-ring pizza parlor).  Again, next time Spicer dismisses something as being "fake news" ask him, how exactly is this report the same as the pizza sex ring story that caused a Trump supporter to shoot up a pizza parlor?  Letting the administration parrot "fake news" all the time does a disservice to those actually hurt my "real" "fake news".

Quote

I'm afraid that's the most likely scenario. The Democratic party cannot waste its time trying to reason with voters who thinks Trump speaks to the "truth" and everything that contradicts him is liberal propaganda. They would be better served shoring up support from the apathetic voters who were too un-enthused about Clinton or mad about Sanders to even vote on election day. 

I have a feeling the only way to find those is to first find out who voted for Trump, and then figure out if the post about politics on social media.  If they do the latter, then they are lost causes, if not, there is still hope.

Edited February 14, 2017 by HawaiiTVGuy

[Dewey Decimate]

On 2/13/2017 at 2:58 AM, walnutqueen said:

Yes,  He had me - until he didn't, with that cheap Gere "joke".  I thought John Oliver was better and smarter than that.  Apparently, I was misled

One sour note in an otherwise brillian comeback - too bad it ruined it for me.

The Gere thing was so silly an example that I thought it held up okay vis a vis the point he was going for. On the other hand, I personally found the Sandy Hook joke about stage parents to be cringeworthy. While I agree that tragedy + time = comedy, it made me uncomfortable. Maybe I'm a little more sensitive, having grown up near and now living adjacent to Newtown, but the whole "stage parents be CRAZY!" punchline wasn't funny enough to warrant a laugh about the slaughtering of twenty young children (and six adults). Like, the level of audacity in the joke topic must be in direct proportion to the level of sheer hilarity. This one felt off.

On 2/13/2017 at 6:17 PM, stillshimpy said:

Last Week Tonight faces such a tough challenge:  How to fit all the horror that is 45 into a 30 min segment.  You know by the time they've got their show in the can on Sundays, they'll have a week's worth of "Oh shit, really? God gawd.  Maybe space aliens will take mercy on us and colonize Earth soon" by the time the show actually airs that evening.  

Keeping that in mind -- and quite possibly because they had to acknowledge at least some of the "What the fuck? Really?" of the three months that LWT has been off the air, I didn't actually find this one of John's stronger episodes but I didn't care because I was so glad that he was back.    

It's frightening how much will cry out to be covered every week, but I too am glad to have JO back. The intro changes alone cracked me up. And I was seriously thinking the other day how the zombie apocalypse or alien invasion might soon be preferable to life on Earth as we know it. I think I can deal with an occasional anal probe or pushing huge stones for Kang and Kodos more comfortably than what fresh hell is revealed on the news every day.

[Danny Franks]

I didn't see any problem with the Richard Gere joke, because it was being framed with 'what the hell? Why was anyone dumb and uncritical enough to think this was true?' And it was a very effective way of showing how powerful widespread dumbness can be, because I immediately thought of the same thing as the rest of John's audience as soon as he said Gere's name.

This episode felt like John just wanted to go full broadside at Trump, and then move on. Because we know he doesn't want to spend a whole season having to focus on every moronic thing that happens because of Trump and his minions. It seemed like he rocketed through the main talking points and did a very effective whirlwind job of demonstrating that the guy is an outright liar, and his media sources are utterly without merit.

There will be a lot more focus on the stupid stuff happening in government, I'm sure, but I kind of hope John leaves Trump himself mostly to the likes of Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers and Steven Colbert. John does a spectacular job of making you care about the stuff that you would otherwise not even read about - infrastructure, net neutrality, the tobacco industry.

I loved the montage of Trump's monumentally dickish handshake. Pathetic 'power move' that just makes him look like a massive tool.

[peeayebee]

3 hours ago, Danny Franks said:

I loved the montage of Trump's monumentally dickish handshake. Pathetic 'power move' that just makes him look like a massive tool

I loved that too. His alpha handshake is laughable at best. It makes perfect sense that this is what he thinks a powerful man should do.