Reply #9: Matt and Trey are a lot of things, but they are NOT Neocons.

[aden_nak]

They are, however, very merciless. And when they turn their attention to something you agree with, the way they pick it apart can make you feel like they are your absolute worst enemy (just ask the Mormons or the Scientologists). If you watch the episode all the way through, the message is actually a good one. That while it's important to do things good for the environment and good for the world (such as driving Hybrid cars), it's also important to not alienate people who disagree with you. Because if you do that, those people will never come around to your way of thinking, even if what you are thinking is right.

Now I'll be honest, I thought they overplayed the George Clooney acceptance speech a bit. At least, at first. But if you are a regular watcher, you'll know they have two kinds of parody. There's genuine parody (like they used on the Scientologists, where they present the ugly facts in such a way that you can't believe it's NOT a spoof) and then there's the over-the-top ridiculous parody, which is as much a parody of how people reacted to the event as it is a parody of the even itself. I took the Clooney bit to be making fun not only of the acceptance speech, but of how people reacted to the acceptance speech.

There's also a third element, which is a running theme for the show. Very often, when an issue is raised in the media, as much attention is given to the ridiculous rhetoric concerning the issue as is given to the issue itself. In this case, they treated the "smugness" of people who drive Hybrids as if it were actually as important as global warming. The idea, I thought, was to point out how incredibly stupid that is, and how incredibly distracted we get on the aspects of a story that just don't matter.