[subscribe2]I admit to being a fan of Jay Leno. By fan I mean I have been recording his program for years and watching when I feel like watching some television. I don’t watch much TV, other than sports. While eating dinner, I like to watch something for an hour that will not piss me off or make me crazy. Leno is the perfect choice. His brand of humor is broad based and well within the bounds of common decency and middle-class respectability. Leno’s jokes are PG-13, his political humor sticks to the obvious from the headlines and it is not particularly ideological. He makes fun of whoever is in the news, regardless of party or status. His bits after his monologue are similarly tame, mostly letting regular people do silly things for the camera. The first 30 minutes make for a good dinner time show. I rarely watch his guests as I don’t follow pop culture.

All that said, I therefore took note of the fact he was being forced out by his employers in favor of a person named Jimmy Fallon. A quick search tells me Leno was dominating his counterparts, including the man-boy favorite, Jimmy Kimmel. The old Marxist David Letterman stagers on in third place. As Leno’s forced exit grew closer, his rating soared to the point where he was becoming a cultural phenomenon. His final show scored huge numbers. According to the people who care about these things, his final show was one of the most watched in decades. As an empirically minded person, 14 million viewers in a nation of 300 million looks tiny to me, but people who make millions to know about this stuff say otherwise. It is just a reminder that culture is not rational in the linear sense of the term.

If a major company decided to retire its top selling and most profitable product, for a new product that is obviously inferior, it could be excusable. Even the best and brightest get wild ideas in their ahead about what lies around the corner. Front running, or attempts at it, is what gets investors in the most trouble. The best investment for the typical American is an index fund based on the broad market or one of the major indices. Millions every day, however, try to guess the market and lose money doing it. If you keep doing it after seeing it fail, then it is not longer folly. There’s something else. NBC tried this a few years back and it was a costly and embarrassing disaster. To do it again when Leno is riding even higher than the last time raises the question. Why does NBC hate him?

I first bumped into the totalitarian mind when I was a kid working in DC. I worked for a Congressman doing nonsense work. Back in the old days, this was common. I’m sure it is a rigid process these days, but three decades ago it was not, so you got a fun mix of personalities. The law student in charge of the young staff was a nice girl, but a hard thumping liberal feminist. Inevitably she set her sights on me as someone who had to be run out of the office as a trouble maker. Her reason, which she told me when I confronted her, was that I was not “very liberal.” That’s all that mattered to her. So much so she did not note that I was the favorite of the congressman’s wife, driving her around town. The lunatic was cut loose and I stayed.

It was my first experience with a fanatic. The second experience was talking with an Iranian exile. He was a student when the Shah fell, but he was not a fanatic. Like me, he was a skeptic and thought his contemporaries were nuts. He told me a story to illustrate his point. In the Iraq war, the Iranian commander asked for volunteers to clear a minefield. About two dozen Revolutionary Guards volunteered. After some prayer, they ran across the minefield, blowing up the mines with their feet. A second wave of volunteers followed showing that the mines had been cleared. I then understood that the fanatics are the same the world around. The object of their fanaticism changes, but everything else is the same. The true believer gives up his identity for that of the group so sacrifice is the ultimate expression of faith.

The point of this diversion is that NBC is run by fanatics. A night watching MSNBC, for example, is a descent into madness. Within living memory, liberal members of the press would have mocked these people as the aluminum foil hat crowd. Today they run the news division of NBC. A good example of just how crazy things are at that asylum, is the Mike Huckabee flap. Despite video evidence showing Huckabee said the opposite of what NBC claims, they still have the fake story on their website. I suspect they really believe he said it. So much so that no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise. These people are no different than those Iranian guards running across the minefield. Reality is now a distant land across the sea.

In such an asylum, a non-believer like Leno would be suspect.All of the bees in the hive work to show their ideological purity. The leadership invests a lot in filtering out the apostates and spies. They are always worried about spies. Anyone that sticks out from the rest of the hive is assumed to be a deviationist. Leno’s willingness to take shots at their cult leaders certainly would alarm lunatics like Maddow. His success and value to the network would not matter much to these people. Their singular focus would be the removal of this bad person. Just as the first disastrous attempt to destroy middle-class health care did not change any minds on the Left, the first disastrous attempt to rid themselves of Leno did not dissuade the lunatics at NBC.

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