I’m With CoCo

Posted January 25, 2010, 12:15 p.m.

I haven’t mentioned it before because there are much, much more important things going on in the world, but I am a big fan of Conan O’Brien. As such, I was quite unhappy to see what NBC did to him by effectively forcing him out of The Tonight Show to be replaced by former Tonight host Jay Leno. I had nothing against Leno and watched Tonight fairly regularly during his tenure, but O’Brien was definitely much more funny and entertaining. When I was younger I would sit through Leno pretty much just to watch O’Brien after, until I got too old to stay up that late ;-).

Obviously the villain in this whole fiasco was NBC and the executives there that made this idiotic decision. O’Brien might not have as many ‘fans’ as Leno, but they are much more vocal and passionate. Plus, Leno is now ‘damaged goods’ and will likely never regain much of the audience he had before (and he has to really retire sooner or later anyway). I really don’t understand what NBC’s end-game is here. And yes, Leno does deserve some of the blame for this mess. The honorable thing would have been to refuse to return to Tonight out of respect for his colleague.

It took Leno almost two years to win his time-slot on The Tonight Show after he took over (in another NBC debacle) from Johnny Carson. O’Brien deserved at least the same amount of faith and loyalty from NBC that Leno got. Personally, as a matter of principle, I don’t intend to watch Tonight when it returns with Leno, and I’ll follow O’Brien—’CoCo’—to whichever network he ends up on. Supposedly, Fox is already trying to pick him up.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.

We may amuse ourselves with names; but the fact is, men will be governed by the motives and temptations that surround their situation. Political evils to be guarded against are in the human character, and not in the name of patrician or plebeian.

The French codes are often difficult of comprehension, but they can be read by every one; nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents.

And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness—and violence, decrepit, will fall.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

I had anger but never hate. Before the war, I was too busy studying to hate. After the war, I thought, What’s the use? To hate would be to reduce myself.

If there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, then truth itself is God.

Christianity, which has declared that all men are equal in the sight of God, will not refuse to acknowledge that all citizens are equal in the eye of the law.

You can get any job done through sheer force of will—and by knowing what you’re talking about.

Only theology has as its essential subject matter the infinite, the transcendent, and the eternal. The subject might exhaust our inner resources, but we can never exhaust its inner riches.

Revolutions like this have happened in almost every country in Europe . . . instances of the people losing their liberty by their own carelessness and the ambition of a few.

Religion begins at the point where reason and knowledge are powerless and forever fail—the point at which man senses the mystery of his good and evil, his suffering and his destiny, as a soul in search of God.

The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented. It’s that socialism has been faithfully implemented.

Suspicion is a virtue as long as its object is the public good, and as long as it stays within proper bounds. . . . Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.

Today, cultural relativism in the West discourages cross-cultural judgments, thus impeding the reform of injustices around the world and inhibiting the defense of Western civilization.

The capital resources of the nation are not increased by using the tax collector rather than the stock market to mobilize them.

For creation without the Creator fades into nothingness.

Risks are not eliminated by imposing them on the taxpayer instead of on the capitalist.

What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him?

The said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of The United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.