I would submit that this opinion brings to mind another point:

Journalists are even less qualified to wax intellectual on comedy than politicians are. Anyone with a halfway academic knowledge of comedy knows that it took uncanny skill to do what George Carlin did, what Lenny Bruce, what Richard Pryor and Don Rickles have done. And it takes NO skill to label it devoid of art by virtue of its crossing societal norms.

But leave it to a journalist to submit their exalted opinion as gospel-truth.

Slate's quality over this cycle has declined to that of a high-school newspaper.

The art of Carlin comes from him jumping over that line and mucking about. For example, Franken might be in trouble for a rape joke, but Carlin already settled the "Can a rape joke be funny" debate. I refer you to Porky Pig v. Elmer Fudd.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much vintage Kinsley: He makes some decent points but the column gets derailed by his needlessly straying off-topic. The bit about Carlin served zero purpose and made Kinsley look petty, like he just couldn't resist taking a shot at a dead man he'd never really liked.

Yet Kinsey simply says why he didn't find Carlin funny, not that nobody should ever find Carlin funny. For the record, I didn't laugh at most of Carlin's stories, but he had so many of them there were always some good laughs in the mix.

And by these comments about dismissing Kinsley's entire point just because you don't agree with Kinsley's views on Carlin ... isn't that sort of the point of the article? That people will judge you for any little thing that they can, and it doesn't matter how good you are at everything else if you screw up just once?

No, my point is that a comment like that about George Carlin, that his brand of comedy takes no skill or artfulness, shows an inexcusably amateurish lack of thought vis a vis the art of comedy. Therefore, his opinion on comedy's political bearing carries no weight. Hence, neither does this article.

But giving Michael the benefit of the doubt, moving past Carlin... If the point of his article is that people shouldn't judge media figures by what they say, then yes, his entire idiotic ramble is irrelevant, and should be treated like a mindless doodle in a notebook. Media's product is the spoken and written word. To attempt to judge them by any other standard is to come up empty-handed for material as a basis of critical thought.

What happened to Slate? Their writers used to be professionals.