Politics & Power Quote by Dennis Miller

A comedian admitting he can be rebranded by catastrophe is both a confession and a sales pitch. Dennis Miller’s “Just put down 9/11...” works like a résumé line and a punchline: the ellipses do the heavy lifting, implying a long, messy personal pivot that he’s daring you to summarize in two digits and a slash. It’s gallows humor with a résumé’s cold efficiency, as if trauma were a credential that explains everything that followed.

The intent is to justify a political realignment without sounding doctrinaire. Miller frames ideology as a playlist you can shuffle: mostly liberal tracks, with two stubborn exceptions. “Defending ourselves” and “keeping half the money” are not policy arguments so much as identity badges. He chooses broad, emotionally freighted phrases that bypass details (what counts as defense? whose money? which half?) and land as gut-level common sense. That’s the subtext: the post-9/11 public mood rewarded certainty, patriotism, and suspicion of nuance, and Miller is positioning himself as someone who got “serious” when the country did.

Context matters because Miller’s career became a case study in how 9/11 reorganized American comedy and punditry. The line smuggles in grievance, too: I’m still the old me, except reality forced my hand. It’s also a neat piece of rhetorical jujitsu. By calling his tax preference “kind of conservative,” he softens self-interest with casual understatement, letting the audience laugh and nod while the hard edge of the claim stays intact.