9
The Dynamic Duo: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert

Why Mediated Morons Matter

JON STEWART

It was a special homecoming weekend for Northeastern University. More than five thousand students packed the Matthews Arena on the Boston campus to hear the feature speaker in what one school official labeled the "single best event" in his time on campus. From a Zombie perspective, he was right. The event featured the left's best spokesman, and it was on the eve of the November election, on October 17, 2008. A perfect forum to juice up support for the One. The speaker wasn't Obama, Bill Clinton, or Oprah. No, it was Jon Leibowitz, more commonly known by his stage name, Jon Stewart, of Comedy Central's The Daily Show.

Stewart stormed the Northeastern stage to a rock-star welcome as thousands of Zombies cheered liberalism's patron saint. Then the conservative bash-fest began. Sarah Palin? "She said that small towns she really likes going to because that's the pro-America part of the country. You know, I just want to say to her, just very quickly: Fuck you."¹

Actually, what Palin had said on the campaign trail was "We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe . . . that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

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 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.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.

* * *

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?"³¹

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.³²

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?"³³ 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.³⁴ 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?"³⁵

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."³⁶

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."³⁷ 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,"³⁸ 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.³⁹

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."⁴⁰

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."

President Bush was obviously uncomfortable. And liberals were beside themselves. How couldn't they be with lines like this: "I stand by this man. I stand by this man, because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things, things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world."

In 2005, Colbert spun off from The Daily Show. He played virtually the same character, but served mostly as one of Stewart's fake correspondents. Colbert's role is the "blindly egomaniacal, Bill O'Reilly-esque talk-show host," as Vanity Fair described it.⁴¹ His role was to embody what he called conservatives who "know with their heart," but don't "think with their head"--the oh-so-famous "truthiness." Liberal writer Steven Daly of the Sunday Telegraph in London praised Colbert as the "titular host [who] offers a funhouse-mirror reflection of the bellicose Right-wing opinionizers of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News" who dominate political discourse with "lengthy and obnoxious opinion-slots that are somehow passed off as 'news.' "⁴²

Colbert's lines may be funny, but the message is calculated to eviscerate conservatives. At the correspondents' dinner, he continued his shtick, painting conservatives as a bunch of baboons:

I'm sorry, I've never been a fan of books. I don't trust them. They're all fact, no heart. I mean, they're elitist, telling us what is or isn't true or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American! I'm with the president. Let history decide what did or did not happen.

And there's the Fox-bashing, of course. He is a fake Fox correspondent, after all! "Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side." But it's not contempt for Washington per se that drives Colbert, it's contempt for conservatives. His whole persona is to mock conservatives. It's to make conservatism so unpalatable that no one from his audience, TV or rival, would back a Republican. The left realizes this. In an article for the Huffington Post called "Obama owes presidency to . . . Stephen Colbert," Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, opined on how the "faux rightwing blowhard" has "filtered into our political/media consciousness."⁴³

Colbert rarely gets out of character. In fact, he spends nearly his entire day in it, by his own admission, and he looks forward to driving home and listening to his playlist, so that he can be normal again (conservatism to him is abnormal) when he gets to his wife and kids.⁴⁴ Colbert is a sitcom taken seriously. But there are rare glimpses into what motivates Colbert.

Most revealing was an interview he had with Daly of the Sunday Telegraph in May 2008.⁴⁵ The interview occurred in Colbert's Manhattan office, and since Daly is a fellow lib, Colbert let his hair down. Daly, like most on the left, affirmed the character of Colbert as the pretend "Fox News Bill O'Reilly" who "takes great pride in shouting down unpatriotic," or as Daly wrote, "dissenting" guests and "occasionally having their microphones switched off mid- sentence."⁴⁶

Explaining the inspiration, Colbert noted: "At the heart of this is America as the chosen country of God. It's conflation of the Statue of Liberty and the crucifix: American religiosity and American destiny are one and the same. That's why George Bush was chosen by God to lead the world. Manifest destiny is an old idea, but now it's just expressed in different ways."

Continuing his rare expression out of character, Colbert said,

The odd thing about the triumphalism of the character is that it works best in an atmosphere of victimhood. These characters [aka conservatives] say people have personal responsibility and they attack people for playing victims. But an ongoing theme with the Christian Right in the U.S. is the "War Against Christmas." That somehow there are sinister forces--read Jews, Muslims, lesbians--that wish to destroy Christmas. It ignores the fact that Christianity is more dominant with our culture than in any other Western society. In a way, they're very much in line with language an Islamic fascist might use, talking about the decadence of the West.

Not so funny, eh? Colbert is earning his leftist street cred with statements like that. It's a peek into the worldview that drives the character that is Stephen Colbert. Like Stewart, Colbert offers an apologia for liberalism. He attempts to bat down conservative arguments. Colbert is giving us a line that we hear from liberal outlets such as the Daily Kos and MoveOn.org.

Daly noted that the day the interview took place was also the day when Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, was booked on the show. Jacoby, a liberal, offers a blistering critique of "the same pathology that Colbert embodies," wrote Daly. That pathology the liberal author defined as "bullet-headed, patriotic incuriosity."

"Knowing things that other people don't know is the definition of elitist," Colbert said in character while interviewing Jacoby. Before the cameras were rolling, Colbert told Daly that his "conservative" persona has more trust in "the invisible hand of the free market" than in "knowledge" and "facts." "The market will take care of poverty. I call it dribble-down economics," he said mockingly. "The rich eat everything--and don't get me wrong, I'm rich--and some of it crusts on their beard, and the poor are allowed to feed on their beard. You can't say they're not being provided for--that's class warfare."

Much of his material is funny. Conservatives aren't humorless, as the false cliche goes. But we understand, and we've seen the effects, of the man who will address a Hollywood audience as "godless sodomites." We understand his worldview. And, more importantly, so does Colbert. Speaking of his "mentor" Bill O'Reilly, Colbert says, "I have a genuine admiration for O'Reilly's ability to do his show. I'd love to be able to put a chain of words together the way he does without much thought as to what it might mean, compared to what you said about the same subject the night before."⁴⁷ By turning conservative ideas into satire and jokes, he and his merry band of eighty-six staffers⁴⁸ have helped lobotomize a generation of Zombies who have written off the successful ideas of limited government and free markets. Colbert even warns his guests that "he's willfully ignorant of everything we're going to talk about."⁴⁹

YOUNG PEOPLE ARE increasingly getting their news from Colbert and Stewart.⁵⁰ A poll released by Rasmussen Reports found that 30 percent of those ages 18-29 say that both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are replacing more traditional news outlets;⁵¹ 35 percent disagree and another 35 percent are undecided.⁵² Amazing! Nearly a third view the dynamic throne sniffers as legitimate news outlets, and another third are not sure what to think? America, your future is not looking good.

Many young people even boast of their fondness for news delivery via liberal comedians. Jen Jablow, an anthropology major at the University of Pennsylvania, said during the campaign that "I think of watching network newscasts as something my parents do. I can't imagine my friends sitting down to watch an actual network newscast at 6:30 because we're doing other things at that time. It's a lot quicker to go online. I customize my news." Like many her age, Jablow is hooked on Comedy Central's fake news shows.⁵³

I'm certainly not saying they should go back to the Brian Williamses and Katie Courics. No! Lord, have mercy! Quite the opposite. The cultural shift is obvious, a shift that Obama picked up on. But replacing any type of traditional news source with acerbic comedians is crazy. Young people would rather laugh than think, feel than analyze. Humor is a feeling, so it plays right into the left's best weapon: emotion. It's the liberal disease: Give me free goods and services! Have those damned "rich" people pay for them! I'm entitled! Me, my, me, my! The left has gone from trusting Dan Rather and Brian Williams to following the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Ideologues masquerading as "fake journalists." Of course, a generation raised on The Simpsons and South Park has a tendency to abandon a network evening format that hasn't changed in decades.

Stewart is cool! Colbert is cool! Obama is cool! See the narrative? Heck, back in 2006 Rolling Stone's cover story declared Stewart and Colbert "America's Anchors!" Matthew Kolasa, a University of Pennsylvania student, admitted that he learned a lot by watching The Daily Show. It's not just for laughs. "Within his political satire, Stewart makes really interesting points. He can make an argument with such smartness and wit. I think the U.S. senators could take a lesson from him."⁵⁴

Taking on the image of an egomaniacal character comes easily to Colbert. His dark personal life, with the tragic deaths of his father and two brothers when he was a child, left him emotionally scarred, toying with his identity, even the identity of his last name. It was always pronounced Colbert, not Colbear. As a kid, he immersed himself in a fantasy world of role-playing games, science fiction novels, and Dungeons & Dragons. Colbert was a wandering actor, a wannabe poet, and a standup comic. He's devoted his life to playing someone else.⁵⁵ It's an exercise in self-hatred. Hopefully Colbert finds his voice, not somebody else's.

There you have it--two men angry at life, masking their anger and sorrows in comedy; they are unpaid volunteers for liberalism, and cronies for Barack Obama.