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Last week Jon Stewart criticized FOX News for being hypocritical about the use of sweeping generalizations of people based on their political beliefs and party affiliations. 

He ended the segment with by showing a clip of Bernie Goldberg saying that a liberal would never allow a child with Downs Syndrome to even be born and then responded to Bernie’s flagrant generalization with, “Go fuck yourselves.”

Bernie Goldberg appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s show to respond to Jon Stewart’s attack, and last night, Jon Stewart responded in full force, complete with gospel choir backup.

It’s genius.

Jon accurately describes FOX News as:  “a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”  (Note to Websters:  Use this in your next edition.)

One of the things Goldberg said that I found particularly revealing was that Jon Stewart should try social commentary.  Of course that’s what he does every night – through comedy – something Goldberg doesn’t seem to grasp. 

And, since this video ping pong match started over the use of sweeping generalizations, I will use Goldberg’s remark to make one of my own. 

Remember a few years back when Fox had its own comedy news show?  You might have forgotten because it wasn’t on for very long.  It wasn’t’ on for long because it wasn’t funny, and it wasn’t funny because conservative pundits like Bernie Goldberg don’t understand satire and are therefore incapable of producing it.

Say hello to the new senator from Massachusetts.

He’s the newest senator representing the G.O.P. – the party of fiscally irresponsible, xenophopic, war-mongering, freedom-hating, money-loving, hypocritical Bible thumping, mendacious moral degenerates.

He is the the pawn on the Republican side of the board that they will use to kill healthcare reform.

But the Democrats still have a big majority, so the stalling tactics of 41 Republicans and one douche bag from Connecticut shouldn’t be a big problem for the 58 Democrats, right?

Wrong!

Jon Stewart explained it best:  “Democrats will only then have an 18-vote majority in the Senate.  Which is more than George W. Bush ever had in the Senate when he did whatever the fuck he wanted to.”  (watch it here)

They aren’t like Republicans.  They would benefit from being more like them in some ways.  This Modern World explains:

And so did Jon Stewart about four minutes into this segment form Monday’s show:

“Mr. President, I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi ten steps ahead of everything or if this this whole health-care thing is kicking your ass just a little bit.  Why is this so hard?  Why can’t you guys just stay on message?  Remember the Bush team?  Little bit of discipline.  Little bit of repetition.  They sold us a war nobody wanted and nobody needed.”

On Sunday, July 26, 2009 Sarah Palin quit her governorship of Alaska and delivered her farewell speech.  It was as incoherent as her resignation speech, but it was a little different this time:  It was poetry!

You can watch Sarah deliver the whole thing herself, or watch the best parts on The Daily Show segment about it, or you can William Shatner recite a stanza on The Tonight Show accompanied by stand-up base and bongo drum in authentic beat-poet fashion.

ff

And getting up here I say it is the best road trip in America soaring through nature’s finest show. Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it’s the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And then in the summertime such extreme summertime about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago, than just some months from now, with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins. It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.

A frame from the June 16th edition of This Modern World:

Ha that’s funny!  Because like even though some crazy conservatives might actually think that, they wouldn’t actually say it out loud, would they?

Michael Scheuer on Glenn Beck’s show last night:

Transcript:

Scheuer: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it’s going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It’s an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.

Beck: Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.

Why do conservatives hate America so much? Why do they think it must be destroyed before they can save it?

For a whole lot more of Michael Scheuer’s batshit crazy analysis, read this column he wrote for the Washington Post that ends with:

…The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party’s left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America’s defense and — like Obama — naively believe that the West’s Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya.

So if the above worst-case scenario ever comes to pass, Americans will have at least two things from which to take solace, even after the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen. First, they will know that their president believes that those losses are a small price to pay for stopping interrogations and making foreign peoples like us more. And second, they will see Osama bin Laden’s shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin.

Michael Scheuer is an ex CIA man and he worked again as Special Advisor to the Chief of the bin Laden unit from September 2001 to November 2004.   He now works as a news analyst for CBS News.  I wonder how much longer he’ll have that job…

UPDATE:  Daily Show coverage of this story here.

The Reverend Jim Wallis interviewed Jon Stewart for Sojourners magazine, a Christian publication about “faith, politics, and culture.”  Wallis starts the interview by comparing Stewart to “The Hebrew prophets” who often used “humor, satire, and truth-telling to get their message across,” which Jon Stewart dismisses.  A little later in the interview comes this exchange:

Jim Wallis:  A lot of people love your show because they feel like someone is finally saying what needs to be said, that the news media is an emperor with no clothes or has no backbone. Are you aware that you’re evoking this sense of relief?

Jon Stewart:  Well, we hear feedback from the audience. We also evoke anger. You know, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. It really is a question of does what you do find an audience, and is it an audience that appears to be ill-served? You can have the same conversation with Fox News and say there are a lot of people out there who feel a catharsis when they hear [them] spinning Obama’s love of Dijon mustard as proof that he is Lenin’s disciple. It’s not one or the other.

People have always said to us, “You want it both ways; you want to be taken seriously but then not.” And I always say, “When do we want to be taken seriously? We’re just doing our show.” It is what it is. It’s no attempt to be taken seriously. That’s how we’ve done things from the beginning and will continue to do so as long as we sell enough Budweiser that Comedy Central will let us stay on the air.

Jim Wallis:  But you take on serious things. I preached a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral and talked about you—it was right after Jim Cramer appeared on your show. The scripture for that day was the text of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers in the temple.

Jon Stewart:  But see, that’s the thing. [Jesus] only had to do one show. We have to do four a week!

Wallis:  (laughing) But I likened your interview with Cramer as a modern enactment of that parable—you were overturning the money changers.

Stewart:  Gee, I hope it ends better for me.

Last night I watched the rerun of the Monday night Daily Show during which Jon Stewart went after Fox News twice.  First he rebutted Joe Scarborough’s rebuttal of a Daily Show piece from last week that ridiculed “Morning Joe” for bringing on Starbucks as a sponsor, using Starbucks product placement in their show, and inviting Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz on as a guest.

Next he goes after Gretchen Carlson who was deeply offended by Brüno’s (Sacha Baron Cohen) performance during the MTV Movie Awards.  Watch to see how Jon portrays Gretchen as an ass-hating, ass-loving hypocrite.

The whole show was excellent.  Just watch the whole thing.

Uh oh… Here I go thinking about torture again.  Yes its a topic that’s been on my mind for weeks, months, years since we first learned that America tortured its prisoners.  Try as the media might to distract me this week with fears of a swine flu pandemic, it’s torture that that has my undivided attention. 

This week started off a comic from This Modern World: (click to read the whole thing.)

That comic was followed by a spirited debate between Jon Stewart and Cliff May, President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, that pits a defender of Bush’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques against a humanitarian that is really worth watching, so watch all three parts.

The Daily Show debate was followed by a contemplative article by Pauline W. Chen, M.D., a surgeon who says people become “habituated” to torture just like surgeons get habituated to cutting into their patients.  It’s not natural.  It’s not comfortable, but if you do it enough times, you can get used to it.  She writes:

After years of training, cutting began to feel second nature to me, the scalpel merely an extension of my fingers. So when a friend earlier this week told me that she could never imagine cutting into another person and wondered how young doctors learn to do so, I had to stop and think before I could respond to her.

“Habituation,” I finally said. “You get used it.”

That response, and the idea of becoming habituated, has been haunting me ever since. Is it possible for all of us to become habituated to the horrific?

And finally there was Obama responding to a question during his 100 days news conference about whether he believed the Bush Administration sanctioned torture:

What I’ve said — and I will repeat — is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values.  I do believe that it is torture.  I don’t think that’s just my opinion; that’s the opinion of many who’ve examined the topic.  And that’s why I put an end to these practices.

I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do, not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, “We don’t torture,” when the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.

And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what’s — what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

And — and so I strongly believed that the steps that we’ve taken to prevent these kinds of enhanced interrogation techniques will make us stronger over the long term and make us safer over the long term because it will put us in a — in a position where we can still get information.

In some cases, it may be harder, but part of what makes us, I think, still a beacon to the world is that we are willing to hold true to our ideals even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy.

…

So this is a decision that I’m very comfortable with. And I think the American people over time will recognize that it is better for us to stick to who we are, even when we’re taking on an unscrupulous enemy.

Obama gets it.

Torture is WRONG!  We should not do it.  We’re better than that. 

Which brings me to this:  When I look at the meter that tracks how many people read this blog and how they get here, I often see that they land on these torture posts by searching for “is torture immoral” and “torture morality” and “why is torture immoral.”  You get the idea.  My first instinct is to follow the search engine to other sites they may have visited, but then I stop and think:  Why do you need some website to give you an answer to that question? 

Slamming people’s heads into a wall, beating them, subjecting them to cold temperatures, keeping them awake for ten days, almost drowning them, stacking them naked into human pyramids.  Those are all terrible things to do to people that cause great physical and/or mental suffering.

What really gets me is how so many Republicans, the party of the Religious Right who claim to follow the teachings of Jesus, try and justify these acts.  Like Jesus would shame men by making them stand naked with women’s underwear on their heads in awkward positions for hours.  Like Jesus would hook wires to a man’s testicles, make him stand hooded and caped on a box for hours, and tell him he wold be electrocuted if he fell.   Really?  They can justify that kind of treatment?   It’s a wonder their heads don’t explode.

So if you landed here because you searched for “is torture immoral,” I will make it simple for you.  YES!  Torture is immoral.  All you have to do is think about it.  And as many religions, including Christianity, teach us; put yourself in the prisoner’s position.  Think about someone torturing you.  Think about fearing for your life as you are nearly drowned.  Think about how it would feel to be deprived of sleep for ten days.  Think about sitting naked on a concrete floor for a day or two.  Can you trick yourself into thinking that you can withstand that kind of treatment so it’s not torture?  Think again.

There are other more humane ways to get information from people that are proven to be more effective and more reliable.  There are ways to befriend captives and make them think it’s in their best interest to divulge information. 

For example, if anyone wanted me to confess to something, all they would have to do is sit down in a bar with me and buy me several shots of single-barrel bourbon - I’d end up telling them everything!   I’d tell so much they wouldn’t even feel bad about giving me megadoses of Advil so I don’t suffer through the whisky hangover the next day.

Okay, I think I’ve gotten a lot off my mind with this one.  I’ll try and find a new topic now.

If you want to read more, read this column by Serge Schmemann that ends with a quote:

“Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand.”  – Aharon Barak, President of the Israeli Supreme Court

It’s been a very busy week (that job thing again…) so I have not had much time to write much about anything, but I have been able to read and watch a few things that are of interest, so here’s a quick review with links so you can learn more.

Obama promised transparency but, as Glenn Greenwald reports, his Justice Department is taking the exact same stance towards the Executive Branch’s power to tap our phones and read our emails without warrants as Bush did.  I consider this a MAJOR breach of trust.  We should all be as outraged as Keith Olbermann.  You can go here to tell Obama what you think of his stance on this issue.

Jon Stewart explains to conservatives that they lost, and that yes… “it’s supposed to taste like a shit taco.”

He bowed.  Stupid mistake.  What should we do?   Impeach him for breach of protocol?  If our previous president was held to account for such minor lapses, he wouldn’t have lasted a week in office.  Whenever Bush did something stooooopid, his supporters just laughed it off with a “Ha ha ha!  Isn’t that charming?”  Now the Obama haters, the worshippers of Bush, blab for hours on 24-hour news channels about an Obama goof-up that doesn’t warrant more of a comment than “he really shouldn’t have done that.  I’m sure he’ll hear about it from his staff and not do it again.”   (I am looking forward to Jon Stewart’s coverage of it.  It will be funny, and I’ll bet he’ll be done in one minute or less.) 

Glenn Beck is batshit crazy.

Krugman says banking SHOULD be boring. It works better that way.

That’s all…

Are you?  I bet you thought that by virtue of being an American citizen living in the U.S.A. you truly were a REAL American.  WRONG! 

You see, there are anti-Americans among us, and you may be one of them!

How can you tell if you are a REAL American.  All you have to do is do this simple math problem that Jon Stewart thought up for The Daily Show:

Why might you be concerned about your “American-ness?” Because some nutjobs have raised the issue:

“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 hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.” –Governor Sarah Palin

“I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America, or anti-America. I think people would love to see an expose’ like that.” –Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann

“I can tell you that the Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia. But the rest of the state, ‘real Virginia,’ if you will, I think will be very responsive to Sen. McCain’s message.” –McCain spokesperson Nancy Pfotenhauer

So if you are someone like me who grew up in small-town America and moved to a major U.S. city after graduating from college, you might think you are still a Real American, but these people think you are not.

 Jon Stewart asks if you are “Pfriend or Pfoe:”

That’s funny, but if deep down inside you are feeling very pissed off at these people for questioning your patriotism, you should listen to what Keith Olberman says about these asswipes:

And if all this sounds familiar to you, well you should reread this 2002 comic from This Modern World.