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George Carlin on Words, War and Power

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Posted on Jun 24, 2008
Carlin

While YouTube teems with clips from the extensive career of the late, great George Carlin, it would be impossible to capture the full scope of his comic genius. Having said that, here are a few highlights.

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By LVogt, June 25, 2008 at 7:37 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

This clip is mildly clever… if your a snickering 12 year old. 
Vulgarity is the failure of a small vocabulary. If people did it less it might still have some impact value. It is neither hip nor shocking. It is pervasive, repetitive, mindless and boring.

Carlin has so much smarter and more substantial material.

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By Mary, June 25, 2008 at 12:51 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Very funny, depressing, but very funny.  Truly depressing, but very funny…....

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By Tony Wicher, June 25, 2008 at 8:50 am #

Re By PatrickHenry, June 24 at 1:04 pm #

Truer words was never spoke. I just wonder whether Obama is going to be any different. I have done my best to get him nominated and elected, but I am waiting to see what he actually does when he gets in. I’ve been around as long as Carlin and I’ve seen what he’s seen. I like this quote:

“You may have noticed that there’s one thing I don’t complain about: Politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says, “They suck”. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. No, they come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and they’re elected by American voters. This is the best we can do, folks. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

....I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”, but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.

I, on the other hand, who did not vote—who did not even leave the house on Election Day—am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.”

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By tomack, June 25, 2008 at 5:31 am #

And some say he declined in his later years; not as funny—TOO political. Bullshit, he was at his very best in recent years. Side splitting funny even when the content was depressing because it was TRUE. As shown in the above quote. 

Intelligent, thoughtful, and “critical thinking citizens” have lost something with his passing.

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By PatrickHenry, June 24, 2008 at 1:04 pm #

A prophet once said:

“The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying ­ lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.” 
 
“But I’ll tell you what they don’t want.  They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. 
 
“You know what they want? Obedient workers ­ people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”
 
“This country is finished.”
George Carlin

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