Obama Zombies: How the Obama Machine Brainwashed My Generation (25 page)

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 pop 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.
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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."
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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.

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TUCKER CARLSON CALLED
Stewart a "butt boy" for his soft interviews with John Kerry. His interviews with Obama show Stewart essentially giving Obama a thorough colonoscopy and enjoying it, to boot.

Just before the 2008 election, on October 29, Obama was a guest on the show via satellite in Florida. The cheers and applauses for Obama were so obvious that even Stewart acknowledged to Obama that "clearly our show is not a swing show, if you will." The questions were anything but tough, anything but inquisitive, anything resembling thought-provoking, and remember, this is the same Stewart who likes lecturing the media on integrity and Fox News for being a lapdog for the Republican Party.

The first question from Stewart: "How are you holding up? How are things going?"
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Whoa! Take that, Barack!

This happened to be the same night Obama ran his infamous thirty-minute infomercial, which had Stewart asking another powerhouse question, Greek-god style, this time about the infomercial. "Will it annoy us, or will we like it?" "Or will we feel comforted?"

Awww. "Will it comfort us?"

Still, Stewart managed to muster the tough questions: "So much of this [election] has been about fear of you: an elitist; a celebrity; a Muslim, terrorist sympathizer; a socialist; a Marxist; a witch . . . the whole socialism and Marxism thing, if you do win, is that a mandate for socialism in this country? . . . Has any of this fear stuff . . . do you
think it has stuck with the electorate? Are you finding that on the trail?"

Stewart was there to offer Obama a venue and to assist him in batting down what they consider falsehoods. Obama's response:

I think there's a certain segment of certain hard-core Sean Hannity fans that probably wouldn't want to go have a beer with me [audience laughter]. But for the average voter, they're saying to themselves, "What's all this stuff about? I'm trying to figure out whether I can hang on to my house or who's gonna help me get a job. What about my health care? My premiums have doubled over the last couple of years." So I don't think they are paying too much attention to this stuff. And the whole socialism argument, that doesn't fly too well. The evidence of this seems pretty thin. I said today, they found proof that when I was in kindergarten that I shared some toys with my friends and that was clearly a sign of subversive activity. Now, Jon, I will say that being on your program is further evidence of these tendencies.

Stewart laughed on cue.

Stewart closed the segment with this cringe-worthy question, knowing full well that Obama was going to take it and turn it to a campaign stump speech: "Is there a sense that you have, you know, two years ago when you began this journey the country was not necessarily in the shape it's in now. Is there a sense that you don't want this?"

Obama:

I actually think this is the time you want to be president. If you went into public service thinking that you can have an impact now is the time you can have an impact. We tend to be a pretty conservative country. I don't mean conservative politically per se, but conservative in the sense, you know, that things are kind of going along pretty well and we don't want to mess with it too much. And then every once in a while you have these big challenges and big problems and it gives an opportunity for us to really move in a new direction. I think this is one of those moments, on things like energy and health care and the economy and education. I think people recognize that what we've been doing isn't working and that means people are going to be more open to change.
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Nice coordination, guys!

Prior interviews with Barack offered the same bro-mance ambience, including this probing one back in 2007: "There's a certain inspirational quality to you. Is that really something America is gonna go for?"
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Or this affirmation: "Here's to staying above the fray, and not having the red-blue divide anymore." Ha! How's that working out for you now, Jon? Obama has been the most politically divisive president in recent memory, but that matters not. It's feeling over fact, faith over hope for the Zombie. Really, entire chapters could be dedicated to Stewart's bro-mantic relationship to Obama during interviews.

Compare and contrast those man-crush sessions to any one of the interviews Stewart conducted with McCain. It was a grilling. It wasn't a lovefest. Stewart was playing liberal inquisitor, especially over the Iraq War.
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While duking it out with McCain over Iraq, Stewart defended Senator Harry Reid's proclamation that the war
was lost (just before the famous and successful surge kicked into high gear).

"In fairness to Senator Reid," said Stewart, ". . . I think what he was saying . . . that militarily . . . you can't win it militarily. I think he said it clumsily but what he said was, it is a political solution not a military solution."

McCain gave his normal line about winning, and not surrendering to the enemy. But what's striking is how Stewart was feeding liberal line after liberal line back to McCain's stance on Iraq.

"Shouldn't we get away from the language of win or lose in Iraq and get more to a descriptive success; metrics; deadlines if you will; timetables [laughter, applause, from the circus animals]."

McCain said sure, if you want to set a timetable for surrender. Stewart called that assertion "unfair" and added: "Isn't the president saying I don't want to set timetables, but our patience is not unlimited, so what he's saying is we're not going to pull our troops out between now and the end of time." How can you say we need a deadline, "but I don't want to pin it down because that's surrender?" Stewart concluded.

Think to yourself, what's funny about this exchange? Stewart likes to pawn off his program as just comedy and throwing spitballs, but where's the punch line? If this brother is not on the DNC's payroll, he's getting gypped!

Stewart to McCain: "Supporting the troops: They say that asking for a timetable or criticizing the president is not supporting the troops. Explain to me why that is supporting the troops less than extending their tours of duty from twelve months to fifteen months, putting them in stop-loss, and not having Walter Reed be up to snuff. How can the president justify that? How can he have the balls to justify that?"
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McCain is booed by Stewart's audience after he says the men and women in Iraq are fighting for a worthwhile cause; they're fighting for freedom, and they're proud to be there.

Stewart: "The majority of [military] guys I talk to say that the political scene is not my scene. I'm a soldier." (As though McCain doesn't know what soldiers think, and recall the deafening silence from the left at the time when Obama's plan to escalate troop levels in Afghanistan was identical to the rhetoric of President Bush.)

Stewart adds this gem: "You cannot look a soldier in the eye and say questioning the president is less supportive to you than extending your tour for three months; you should be coming home with your family. And that's not fair to put on people that criticize.

"This is not about questioning the troops and their ability to fight and their ability to be supported. That is what the administration does, and that is almost criminal."
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And this is just part of one interview with John McCain, as Stewart has gone toe-to-toe in plenty of others. He goes after conservatives, and did so constantly during the 2008 election. After the election, the
New York Times
asked J. R. Havlan, a writer for
The Daily Show
, if Obama's victory was a "mixed blessing," to which Havlan said, "It's probably no secret where our politics lie."
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Clearly it's not a secret, J.R., and that's the point. Little people of the world, unite!

STEPHEN COLBERT

In 2006, the Republicans in Congress took a beating. They lost both the Senate and the House. The result didn't seem that surprising, given an unpopular war waged by an unpopular president, and with a
Republican majority that acted like Democrats and spent tax dollars as though they were Monopoly bucks. But was there more to this drubbing? And by more, did Jon Stewart's partner in crime, Stephen Colbert, have anything to do with the Republican implosion at the polls? Why am I even mentioning Stephen Colbert in a discussion about the election and defeat of candidates? We'll call it the "truthiness" factor, the famous term coined by Colbert to reflect making up facts and relying on feeling to reach conclusions . . . rather than reaching conclusions based on facts and analysis. But Stephen Colbert actually may have influenced the election, and liberals praise him for it. After the 2006 election, the liberal
New York Times
columnist Frank Rich wrote about his "favorite moment from the fabulous midterms of 2006,"
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and that was Colbert's now-infamous gig at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Colbert began:

Wow! Wow, what an honor! The White House Correspondents Dinner. To actually--to sit here at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush, to be this close to the man. I feel like I'm dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You know what? I'm a pretty sound sleeper; that may not be enough. Somebody shoot me in the face. Is he really not here tonight? Damn it! The one guy who could have helped.

Colbert, in his buffoonish way, playing an idiot, continued:

. . . it is my privilege to celebrate this president, 'cause we're not so different, he and I. We both get it. Guys like us, we're not some brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut. Right, sir? [to President Bush] That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in
your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.

Every night on my show,
The Colbert Report
, I speak straight from the gut, okay? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the "No Fact Zone." Fox News, I hold a copyright on that term.
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Is he funny? Yes. I think he's more funny than Stewart. But the two are cut from the same leftist cloth. His faux reality is one jab at conservatives after another. It has made Colbert heroic to the left. His "comedy" to liberals is a takedown of conservatives. There weren't too many laughs at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Many of the attendees thought the jokes were too over-the-top and highly disrespectful. But with the speech live on C-SPAN, it quickly went viral and became a rallying cry for liberals nationwide. Liberal bloggers dubbed the routine as the "turning point in revealing that the emperors of the media often wear no clothes." Or as
Vanity Fair
put it, "the speech turned Colbert into a kind of folk hero for the left."
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And you know what? It's true. Colbert's salvos wrapped up in "comedy" included "I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq." On President Bush's low approval rating, Colbert said, "Guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias."