Stewart continued: "You know, NYC was good enough for fucking Osama bin Laden, it better be good enough for you. That's what I think."
"I can't take it anymore . . . after eight years of this divisiveness, we're back to this idea that only small-town America is the real America." Stewart groused that Palin was writing off "entire swaths of the country," saying that "cities are just a lot of towns piled on top of each other in one building." Meanwhile, Stewart took direct aim at the selection of Palin: "McCain made an interesting vice presidential choice. I like the woods . . . I just don't know if I would pull my vice president out of the woods randomly." Sounds a little like Stewart was doing his own version of "writing off a swath of the country."
The nearly hour-long "comedy" routine was little more than a liberal screed of talking points. Stewart "joked" about Palin's criticisms of Obama's cozy relationship with bomb-thrower Bill Ayers and even Obama's position on abortion. "I've never seen someone with a greater disparity between how cute they sound when they're saying something and how terrible what they're saying is," Stewart said while doing goofy impressions of the Alaska governor. "Don'tcha know, Obama, by golly, he just a terrorist? . . . Oh, you know, he just, gosh, kills babies, you know."
No one deemed Stewart's "cute" comment as sexist.
Speaking about McCain, Stewart said that he had "never seen a dude just wander off in the middle of the debate,"2 looking for "Mr. Puddles," ascribing dementia to the Arizona senator. "I got sausages," the McCain impression went. Stewart, again in the faux comedy tone, painted McCain as irrational during the debates, flailing his arms around in disgust, pouting, throwing temper tantrums. "He looks like he's ready to fucking kill somebody," said Stewart. "Lasers are gonna come out of his eyes." But Obama? Well, he was calm, collected, and cool--going through his "plan," his "six-point plan," Stewart told the five-thousand-plus crowd.
And there you have the left's secret weapon, folks: a forty-something self-loathing New Yorker is liberalism's greatest spokesman today. Young people are drawn to Jon Stewart's nightly dose of zany facial expressions, liberal drivel, and F-bomb-laced commentary. Believe it or not, his program is where many young people get their daily news of what's going on in the real world. Sad? Yes. Surprising? Hardly. As we have seen throughout this book, Zombies don't think, they feel.
But it's all just comedy, right? We shouldn't take Jon "little man" Stewart seriously. I mean, he doesn't even take himself seriously. That's certainly the skirt he hides behind when his partisanship is called into question. This is hardly surprising given that Stewart's television program takes cues from the partisan, leftist smear group Media Matters.3 But Stewart is often mean and downright nasty. Sarah Palin is not just politically flawed, in his estimation. Nope. According to Stewart, former governor Palin is comparable to the devastation in Germany that led to Hitler's rise to power. "Have you noticed how [Palin's] rallies have begun to take on the characteristics of the last days of the Weimar Republic?" he said to a crowd at the stuffy Waldorf-Astoria. " 'Who is Barack Obama?' Hey, lady, we just met you five fucking weeks ago."4
Or how about when the self-righteous "comedian" called the late conservative columnist Robert D. Novak a "115-year-old vampire demon," a "terrible person," and an "enemy of American democracy"?5 During the Republican convention in Minnesota, Comedy Central paid for a billboard near the main airport that came from The Daily Show. It read, "Welcome, Rich White Oligarchs!"6
Stewart has compared Fox News to Al Jazeera7 and relentlessly attacked the Bush administration, gloating that he looked forward to January 21, 2008, "as a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal."8 Serving up an inquisition for every conservative guest on his show (while giving liberals a free pass), Jon Stewart has thrust himself into the position of the Pied Piper of liberalism. And for that, he is crowned in glory by fellow nancy boys in the mainstream media.
In discussing Stewart as among Time magazine's hundred most influential people, Tom Brokaw may have engaged in the mother of all sycophantic, orgasmic fits of fawning, calling him America's "Athenian, a voice for democratic ideals and the noble place of citizenship, helped along by the sound of laughter."9 Remember now, Stewart has a show . . . on Comedy Central, for Pete's sake. But in the mind of Brokaw, he's apparently our Greek god and protector of the planet.
Matt Lauer, an official Obama lapdog for NBC, referred to Stewart as "one of the most respected and listened to political voices in this country."
The New York Times absurdly called Stewart "the most trusted man in America." And in the profile on him, we know why he was graced with that title. As the Times reporter stated, "Mr. Stewart's comedic gifts--his high-frequency radar for hypocrisy, his talent for excavating narratives from mountains of information, his ability . . . 'to name things that don't seem to have a name'--proved to be perfect tools for explicating and parsing the foibles of an administration known for its secrecy, ideological certainty and impatience with dissenting viewpoints."10 And even though the Times was admitting that Stewart got off on flaming the Bush administration night after night, it somehow had the audacity to claim that The Daily Show "is animated not by partisanship but by a deep mistrust of all ideology." So long as that ideology is conservatism.
Newsweek called The Daily Show "the coolest pit stop on television." The Daily Variety called it "almost impossible not to appreciate how sharply it tears down falsehoods permeating the political world," even while the paper accurately called the program "anti-Republican."11 David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker magazine, called Stewart America's "most astute--and obviously, most hilarious--press watchdog and overall political bull- shit monitor. His most effective move is to cull through the tapes of all the countless banalities, hypocritical contradictions and attempted snow-jobs executed in boundless profusion on our airwaves and on political podiums. He just puts them on the air and you watch with slack-jawed amazement."12 Stewart has also been labeled the "voice of reason in an insane world" and the "epicenter of real news."13 In an online poll, Time called him America's most trusted news anchor, dwarfing Brian Williams by 15 percentage points.14
You read that correctly. A leftist comic delivering fake news is "the most trusted news anchor."
So just how much in the tank is Stewart for liberals? The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism analyzed content from The Daily Show for the entire 2007 year in a report titled "Journalism, Satire or Just Laughs? 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,' Examined," and, surprise, surprise, found blatant bias: Republicans "were more often the targets of Stewart's humor. In the mix of on-air guests, Democrats and Republicans appeared in near equal numbers. But a more qualitative impression suggests that those Republican guests are far more likely to be challenged by the host."15
An example was the interview with John Bolton, former ambassador to the United Nations. It quickly became heated as Stewart attacked the Bush administration over the brouhaha involving Joe Wilson and his wife, former CIA agent Valerie Plame.
"Why the games? Why, when you go after and you out a C.I.A. agent [Valerie Plame Wilson], why not just come out and say, 'she was the person who sent Joe Wilson. He was wrong and all I did was tell newspaper reporters that fact.' Why then pretend, 'no, we didn't say that. We had nothing to do with it.' Man up and come out and say these people have to be sympathetic to the President. Why lie about it?"16
Another Pew example involves Stephen Hayes, who had written a favorable biography of Dick Cheney. When Hayes acknowledged that the Bush White House mishandled Iraq, Stewart responded thus:
"Then stop making the rest of us feel like idiots when we question their strategy on the war on terror and stop making--and I don't mean you, I mean them--I think that they've gone, they've seemingly gone out of their way to belittle people and he's [Cheney] actually literally come out and said if you don't elect us, we might get hit again. That to me is--I can't jibe the portrait you paint of the steadfast leader with the fearmongering, not bright guy that I've seen."
17
You see what I mean about carrying water for the left, right?
Pew even juxtaposes his interviews with conservatives to his interviews with leftists. One such interview was with Michael Moore, who had just released Sicko, a documentary that praised Cuba's health-care system.
Stewart encouraged Moore to talk more about the film but never challenged Moore's theories. As Moore turned to his getting bumped off Larry King Live because of news about Paris Hilton, the sense of camaraderie continued. "But then I thought about it and I figured," Moore reasoned sarcastically, "you know . . . you know, the priorities are in order. Paris Hilton, healthcare for all . . . you know . . ." Stewart sympathetically replied, "I think if she's ok, aren't we all ok." Moore agreed, playing on the same joke. "She is our proxy . . ." Stewart continued, "In many respects, she is the canary in our coal mine."18
This is Pew, no partisan outfit, mind you. After all the group's research, this conclusion is reached:
What explains these differences? Why do Republicans find themselves more a topic of ridicule than Democrats? We cannot answer that definitively here, but can suggest some possibilities. One explanation is that the show's writers and producers and Stewart himself are simply liberal, and in the course of offering their comedy are also offering their own political views. Another possibility is that the agenda is fundamentally more anti-establishment than anti-Republican.19
Hmmm, I'm gonna go with (a), Stewart is just a partisan hack. When he starts off his show with a monologue, it's used as his leftist bully pulpit. As Pew noted, "The Daily Show aims at more than comedy. In its choice of topics, its use of news footage to deconstruct the manipulations by public figures and its tendency toward pointed satire over playing just for laughs, The Daily Show performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature--getting people to think critically about the public square."20 And by "think critically," they meant to say serve as a battering ram for the left. Whatever it takes is a small price to pay to churn out converted Zombies.
Granted, Stewart hasn't completely slobbered over Obama during his first year in office. Every fish makes its way out of water occasionally. Stewart has taken him to task on his failed pledges to close Gitmo and rescind "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Those rhetorical bombs from Stewart, however, are still launched from a leftist perspective.
WISELY, STEWART DEFLECTS his leftist credentials through self-deprecation. Any time he's asked about his impact on the elections or the role he fosters in the newsrooms, there's always a self-effacing joke, or as Stewart has remarked, "When the focus of the country turns to matters you've been dealing with, for a moment you could almost believe what you do matters. Then you go back and remember, 'Oh, yea, we don't.' "21
This is, of course, bunk. One of the most lethal rhetorical weapons is comedy. It's a win-win. You score points while claiming that your disgruntled opponent can't take a joke. Double points.
One of the clearest (and most memorable) examples of Stewart hiding behind "comedy" was his infamous encounter on CNN's debate show, Crossfire. Stewart, on tour promoting his book America (The Book), sat down in the CNN studios on October 15, 2004, just before the election between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Stewart immediately jumped all over hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson for "hurting America" with the style of debate their program employed. "Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America." And they were hurting America because, in Stewart's words, they were "partisan, what do you call it, hacks." Stewart lectured the guys on what honest debate looks like, and how they needed to stop "spinning" for their candidates of choice. Stewart asked childishly absurd questions such as "why do we have to fight?" and "why do you argue?" Begala, a fellow liberal, explained to Stewart that in a country with liberals and conservatives, their show would of course feature debate and disagreement, but Stewart would have none of it.
"I'm here to confront you; we need help from the media, and they're hurting us." Carlson compared and contrasted the questions he and Begala would ask to the questions Stewart asked Kerry. "How are you holding up? Is it hard not to take the attacks personally?" And here's where Stewart hides behind his facade of comedy while lecturing the rest of us on our moral inferiority: "I didn't realize that . . . the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity."
When Stewart is confronted with an alternative opinion and his credentials come into question, he reverts back to "Oh, I'm just a comedian. Hardy-har-har." "The show that leads into me is puppets making prank phone calls," he told Carlson.
In a similar vein, at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, Stewart told USA Today, "The whole idea that we're the beacon of integrity is ridiculous. We get far more attention from you guys [media] than we should."22 He's also minimized his role by saying his job amounts to just "throwing spitballs."23 In one instance, when Matt Lauer asked Stewart if the increased number of young people turning out in the presidential election was partially attributable to The Daily Show's success, the pissant shrugged it off while finding room to cast more stones at John McCain. "I don't doubt that humor can bring people into a system. I also think it helps to have some candidates, you know, who are not necessarily Matlockian," alluding to a television character who was well liked by older folks.24
But in reality, Stewart and his bevy of Ivy League writers do view their job as to entertain--at the expense of conservatives. And Stewart himself becomes wildly unfunny, as he did on the set of Crossfire, when he either is confronted with tough questions (he becomes defensive) or lectures the media on their journalistic role. At the end of his Crossfire appearance, Carlson was rightfully fed up with a moralizing speech from a guy who, in Tucker's words, sniffs the throne of liberals. "I do think you're more fun on your show. Just my opinion," said Carlson. The little funny man's response? "You know what's interesting, though? You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show," replied Stewart.
And thus the veil is lifted. The partisan hackery belongs to Stewart. But even as he writes himself off as not having influence or being beneath political influence, it's really a ploy to gain even more adulation and influence with the media elites and adoring leftist audiences who will cheer and applaud like circus animals, laughing slavishly at whatever comes out of Stewart's self-loathing mouth.
At the Democrat convention in Denver in 2008, Stewart hosted a breakfast with political writers from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, and other news outlets. He blasted Fox News's "fair and balanced" slogan as an insult "to people with brains," claiming that if it weren't for Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, the network would even find a way to frame news that Obama cured cancer as an "economic disaster."25
"I'm stunned to see Karl Rove on a news network as an analyst." Well, Jon, what about the hundreds of other "analysts" who are clearly Democrats but grace CNN, MSNBC, and yes, even Fox News? Or better yet, James Carville, who was instrumental in Bill Clinton's election victories? Nope, not the same, says Jon. "I don't think [Carville's] being passed off as a sage,"26 reported the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz. Stewart scolded the gaggle of reporters to "earn your authority back"27 and discontinue the off-the-record dinners with politicians. "That colors your vision of them so clearly and so profoundly." When challenged on this point with the argument that getting to know candidates is important, even if in a background setting, Jon responded, "I don't say access is useless. But the more you get sucked into it, the more you become part of that machinery."28
For all the talk that Stewart is just a funnyman, he gets pretty darn serious about Fox News and other intricacies of media coverage. It's a typical Zombie multiplier, as is the case every time you attack Fox News: it's street cred among the liberal cognoscenti, even as his Zombie-packed audience is too stupid to realize the schizophrenia of his positions.
Is he funny? Sure, I'll give him that. Even though conservatives bear the brunt of his jokes, I do find Stewart smart and sometimes entertaining. Conservatives are generally slow on what's in with p
op culture, and that has to do with the fact that we're more interested in ideas than iconography. Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ain't exactly our "peeps." Plus, personal responsibility isn't exactly chic these days. But Stewart's tiresome years of unrequited cheap shots tailored to the under-thirty crowd are paying off. He is a pop cultural icon, much like this president. It is cool to support him; that's the fad. But make no mistake about it: Stewart is a dedicated liberal foot soldier (that is, if liberals actually became "soldiers").
On the decidedly left-wing website Daily Kos, one writer, under the headline "The debt we owe Jon Stewart," credited Stewart with Obama's lead in the polls.
There are a lot of reasons why Obama is ahead in the polls, and why we can be cautiously optimistic about the outcome of this election. One of these reasons is the work of Jon Stewart and his Daily Show for the past nine years. Despite the fact that the Daily Show is on cable, and thus doesn't have the ratings of more mainstream political shows, it has had a fundamental impact on how many voters, particularly young voters who have come of age during its lifetime, view politics and political discourse.29
The piece proclaimed, "Jon Stewart has been the best weapon our country has had against the last eight years of fearmongering, wedge issues, and cultural wars. If the Democrats take the White House this year, we all owe a debt of gratitude to him for his unflinching search for truth."30
You can't get any more left-wing than Daily Kos. And it doesn't get any more revealing, either. Liberals see Stewart as their antidote to Fox News, as their counterpart to Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and the king of talk radio, Rush Limbaugh.