Tag: Jon Stewart

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Wienergate

Unemployment. The War in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq. Global warming. Thousands killed in Syria. The government collapsing in Yemen. Spain and Portugal going broke. Japan. Cancer. AIDS.

The Anthony Wiener story is intended to amuse the illiterate, the sheep, and the frigid-hysterics while the government and big corporations continue to ensure the gradual impoverishment of the middle and lower classes and continuation of disastrous foreign policies over there.

I am hugely disappointed in Jon Stewart. The story was funny for five minutes, not 105. And it wasn’t funny because a foolish young politician made stupid decisions. The very, very funny part of the story is Wolf Blitzer with a straight face pretending to be a journalist. At least he got that right.

I was baffled, at first, by the amount of time Stewart was giving this story. Wasn’t he doing exactly what he frequently ridicules other media organizations of doing? Tunnel vision. Flogging a trivial, inane issue to death?

Mystery solved: Stewart is very touchy about some critics who claimed he low-balled the issue on the first day because of his personal friendship with Anthony Wiener– not, they believed, because he was rational. Those critics successfully manipulated Jon Stewart and made him look like a fool as, on the very next Daily Show, he desperately tried to muster the hysterics to prove that he really, really can’t be tricked out like some CNN tart. He made the story the centerpiece of three consecutive Daily shows, long after it stopped being funny.

But then, that’s about all you get on the news these days, including the CBC up here in Canada. When it’s not falling over itself to drool over the royal wedding.

At the end of the June 8th “Daily Show”, Stewart played a clip of a reporter listing five or six important stories she had intended to cover and then announcing that she would not be covering those stories because there were new developments in the Anthony Weiner story.

My wife and I could never could figure out if the reporter was being sarcastic or serious. It is so had to tell nowadays. But it was utterly shameless of Stewart to play it because he was doing the same thing or worse.

If you were to be honest with yourself for a moment… if you woke up one day and heard that Anthony Wiener, who is married, had flirted with several other women online, would you really believe that this was an important story that needed to be on the front page of every newspaper and online news website in the country?

But you believe it now, don’t you? Because it was on the front page of every newspaper, top of the news on every broadcast, all over the web. You believe that no story would be given such prominence by so many different news organizations and media entities if it wasn’t really and truly important.

Or do you think for yourself?

No matter how many news organizations cover it, nor how many gallons of ink are spilled on it, or how many photographs or videos or web pages, or self-serious pundits using euphemisms, no matter, no matter, no matter, the Anthony Weiner scandal is trivial and irrelevant and unimportant.

The real story now is just how bad is the entertainment-news industry in the U.S.? And the next real story is, is this really what Americans want– because they do tune in– or is something they are having shoved down their throats? The Anthony Wiener story might well begin to seem important to some people because coverage of it is ubiquitous.

This story will die soon enough. Unlike Sarah Palin’s enduring idiotic appeal to every numbskulled dissident survivalist in the U.S.– something that appears to be trivial but isn’t (we’re talking about the intellectual ability of a potential candidate for the highest office in the land)– this never was a real story, there never was a real impact, and not even Fox News can make a whole turd out this fart.

No crime was involved. No political issues were involved. It’s none of anybody’s damn business.

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Mad Hatters of the Tea Party

It’s not that big of a secret that the real movers and shakers in the Republican Party are not Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle, or even Jim DeMint or Sarah Palin.

Well, I think it is to the Tea Partiers.

Listen to this comment by Trent Lott, Svengali of the Republican Establishment, now a lobbyist just raking in the dough, as was always his purpose as a Republican politician (if you receive the money afterwards, is it still a bribe?): “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them”.

“They” are the tea party. It won’t be difficult– “they” are Republicans. They actually believe that in America, the goal of government is to provide a level playing field so that companies can battle it out among each other to provide consumers with the best products at the best price. They are in for a shock. The first thing they will learn, from Trent Lott, Karl Rove, and the others, is that the purpose of Republican government is to pin down the young, the poor, the middle class, and entrepreneurs so that the corporations can ransack their pockets with impunity. The rich, powerful corporations actually control the legislative process through lobbyists who lob millions of dollars at every politician in the firm belief that their votes can be influenced.

What Lott is afraid of– and it’s an amusing scenario– is that some of these tea party candidates are what I call “true believers”. What if they reject the money and vote their conscience? Oh my! The horror! At what point will Sharron Angle realize that she is not voting to “level the playing field” on most legislation– she will be voting to confer fabulous favors and benefits upon powerful interests who will gladly, in return, pay for the expensive negative ads she needs to run in her next election campaign when, undoubtedly, she will be running “against” Washington.

Jon Stewart hilariously showed us John McCain, in a recent campaign ad, declaring that Washington was “broken” and needed to be fixed. Then he showed us McCain using the same line over and over and over again going back to his first election campaign 30 years ago.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…. three times… eight times… ten times… uh… doh!

For all the media hype, how much influence has the Tea Party had on this election? Well, name a single Tea Party candidate who won a seat that the Republicans would have lost without him or her?

That’s right– not one.

Why? That’s pretty straight forward: a “movement” unconnected with a particular idea is always going to fizzle. The Tea Party doesn’t really have a single coherent idea that isn’t

  1. already held, in emasculated form, by the Republican Party,
    too whacko to ever be implemented,
  2. too generalized and idealistic to have any real application.
  3. In August, CNN revealed that the percentage of Americans who actually call themselves members of the Tea Party? 2.

That said, what a shame that we won’t have a real tea party victory. A victory by the Tea party– by the true believers– would be as devastating to corporate interests and old guard Republicans as it would be to the Democrats. If Tea Party Candidates came in and cleared out the lobbyists, the backroom deals, the earmarks, and so on, we might all be better off than we would be under a victory by so-called moderate Republicans.  That is, if they do what they say they will do.

It’s a little puzzling that so much mainstream media– allegedly “liberal”, of course– have given so much coverage to the Tea Party, which, as the Washington Post discovered, is actually quite small and really insignificant.

Why why why? I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, so it must be because conflict and anger and spectacle make good news.

“Look at Lott’s lobbying clients: Citigroup, General Electric, Raytheon, Entergy and other Beltway bandits, subsidy sucklers and regulatory robber barons. These guys live off of bailouts, massive government spending, and earmarks. These are exactly the policies Republicans are supposed to oppose, but don’t. They’re also the very things Tea Partiers and Jim DeMint rail against most.”

Read more at the Washington Examiner.  [dead link: sorry.]

 

The picture, at the top, is of my feet, 1976, Calgary, Alberta, sitting in a basement apartment we rented for the summer while working for the United Grain Growers.

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Jon Stewart’s Compromise

How anti-establishment, really, is Jon Stewart? He sounds independent. He seems to be authentic. He sounds like he thinks he is saying exactly what he thinks we think he thinks.

Then why the hell is there bleeping?

No, I don’t believe Jon Stewart is being naughty. Genuinely naughty people do not appear on Oprah, or host the Oscars. Genuinely naughty people don’t get tv shows, with the enormous costs underwritten by Time Warner, one of the most “established” media companies there is.

He is not exploding with righteous indignation, so overwhelmed that he must use the strongest word he can think of to express his outrage. No, he isn’t. If he was, there would be no bleep, because the bleep is not what most people think it is– it is not a network censor alertly snuffing an obscenity while monitoring a live broadcast. The bleep is done by an employee of Time Warner.

So you have to ask yourself, why doesn’t Time Warner simply tell Jon Stewart to stop using words that it has decided should not be allowed on television? Why not? Come on– think seriously about it. Forget the drama that plays every night on “The Daily Show” and consider the reality instead: why not? And why, if Jon Stewart has such high personal standards for honesty and integrity, does he allow them to do it? And since he allows them to do it and they keep doing it and he keeps doing it — isn’t what we have here actually a little “drama”? A shtick?

The idea Stewart wants to believe is that Stewart authentically wants to be himself but the deep, dark forces of repression prevent him.

I don’t believe he wants us to hear anything quite so much as the bleep itself, to imply that he is so naughty, so out-of-control free-spirited and independent, that he just says whatever he thinks, even if some weird authority– who is not stopping him from criticizing politicians– has to bleep it out. So, are we to believe that these authorities who are protecting our delicate moral fiber from being sullied by foul language, don’t care when he criticizes the government?

Or is the bleeping intended to give us an illusion? We are so cool because we listen to a guy who is so toxic to the government, that they have to bleep him? It doesn’t make any sense. The network (HBO, which is owned by Times Warner) pays Jon Stewart a lot of money to be on their tv show so they show him to as many people as possible and make lots of money selling advertiser dollars. If Stewart was really subversive or dangerous in any way, the government would express its displeasure to Times Warner’s Board of Directors (rich, anonymous bastards, who have dinners with politicians) and the Board of Directors would call in the producers and the producers would tell Jon Stewart not to go there.

If Stewart, like Bill Maher before him, decided to “take a stand”, don’t think for one second that Times Warner would hesitate to fire him. You think Jon Stewart’s too popular for them to do that? He’s not too popular to be bleeped. He’s not too popular to sit in that same seat night after night knowing full well he will get bleeped again and again.  He’s not too popular to consent to the bleep.

It makes me wonder what a real rebel would sound like. Probably something like Pete Seeger.

We know that. A real rebel says things like this: you can say what you want about the terrorists who crashed their planes into the twin towers but one thing you can’t call them is “cowardly”. A real rebel says that and the real rebel gets fired from a show that claimed to be “politically incorrect” .

It was a magical moment of transparency for television that nobody seemed to even notice. A television program billing itself as “politically incorrect” and ostensibly containing the free, independent expressions of opinion and ideas, was obviously a charade, a hoax, a fraud. The first time someone on the program expressed an opinion that was really at odds with the powers-that-be, the establishment shut him down. And barely anyone complained. They were too busy protesting Janet Jackson’s nipple.

So what’s the point of the show? Why did they bother to let it on the air if they were only going to shut it down if it ever actually was “politically incorrect”? Obviously, the point is to give the illusion to everyone that we have freedom of speech. We are free country. Nobody is telling you what to think.

So the fact that Jon Stewart is still on the air is somewhat distressing to me. It makes me suspect that Jon Stewart is on the air to convince the American public that they have been regularly exposed to the full range of intelligent opinion about serious matters social, economic, and political. All they have to do to exercise their freedom now is choose between, for example, John McCain, who wants to continue to use rendition to deal with suspected terrorists, continue to abridge the civil rights of all Americans, continue to use torture on the illegal prisoners, keep health care in the hands of private, for-profit insurers, and continue the war in Afghanistan, and Barack Obama, who wants to continue to use rendition to deal with suspected terrorists, continue to abridge the civil rights of all Americans, continue to use torture on the illegal prisoners, keep health care in the hands of private, for-profit insurers, and continue the war in Afghanistan.

I think most Americans don’t think the idea of consuming less, for example, is a serious opinion. Or the idea of self-restraint. Or putting part of your wages aside into a savings account. Or waiting until you have a legitimate down payment before buying a house. These are opinions even Jon Stewart will not express. It is one thing to attack them– the big banks, the Bush Administration– because everyone can still feel innocent. Attack the real cause of the economic meltdown– the utter credulousness of the American consumer along with his passionate greed– and you will be regarded, decisively, as politically incorrect.

In “Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Leonard Cohen”, Cohen is shown about to do a recording in a studio. A producer reminds him, just before they start, not to use any “dirty” words. Cohen, who is normally the most sanguine of poets, is briefly visibly annoyed, and says: There are no dirty words, ever.

Years later, Cohen bleeped himself in performances of “The Future” substituting “careless” for the word “anal” in this line:

Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that’s left
And stuff it up the hole in your culture

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Liberal Culture

There’s a hole in daddy’s arm
where all the money goes
Jesus Christ died for nothing,
I suppose.

I wonder if hard core George Bush supporters ever watch Jon Stewart late at night and say to themselves, gosh, I wish we had one of those. Because as much as you’d like to believe that Ann Coulter is witty or that Bill O’Reilly is smart or that Sean Hannity is insightful, you just know they’re not, and you just know that Jon Stewart and George Clooney and, in this case, John Prine, are way smarter and way cooler and way more astute than any conservative writer or commentator except maybe Clint Eastwood.

And I think conservatives know it as much as anyone knows it. Why else would they even care what gets published in the New York Times or who says what on “60 Minutes” or who wins Oscars or Grammies? If the New York Times is really out of step with the majority of right-thinking Americans, then your worries are over, aren’t they, Charles Krauthammer?

Not exactly. There was a man who served on our church council in Chatham who never, ever voiced an opinion on the matter of women serving in church office. He just listened to all the arguments and then made up his mind that he wouldn’t listen to any of the arguments but just vote the way he felt about the issue, which was that it just wasn’t right for women to serve as Deacons. When I challenged him to explain why he believed what he did, he became annoyed and frustrated, and finally blurted out, “that’s just the way I feel”.

So even though Sam Stone is an amazing song that convinces you that there is something totally messed up with the war in Viet Nam– it’s probably not going to change your mind about Iraq or Iran or North Korea. Those people still need to be killed. And the more they think we want to kill them, the safer we’ll all be.

Free speech does not guarantee anyone the right to be heard but it does guarantee the right of the speaker to speak and not be silenced.”

Cal Thomas.

So it’s a good thing if Fox News, or the White House, or CNN, doesn’t actually allow anyone with a contrary opinion the opportunity to address any issues. You just go right on holding your contrary views in your own living room, where they can do the least damage. And a President who, according to Newsweek, doesn’t hear anything that contradicts his own views on the Iraq war or terrorism or global warming or free speech, shouldn’t worry about the fact that he isn’t exposed to any new ideas or possible solutions.

On John Prine’s brilliant Donald and Lydia.

Who do you want to invite to your party?

Conservative: Bill O’Reilly
Liberal: Jon Stewart
Conservative: Ann Coulter
Liberal: Hillary Clinton
Conservative: Clint Eastwood
Liberal: George Clooney
Conservative: Sonny Bono’s second wife
Liberal: Sonny Bono’s first wife.
Conservative: Ted Nugent
Liberal: Janet Reno
Conservative: Reese Witherspoon
Liberal: Keira Knightly