-By Warner Todd Huston
Jon Stewart, former host of the left-wing Comedy Network cable TV show, “The Daily Show,” had a LOT to say during a recent interview with New York Times editor Chris Smith and with his uppercut smacks to the left in general and Barack Obama in particular, some of what he said is sure to infuriate his fellow leftists. But in fact, Stewart was right on with many of his criticisms.
Stewart was being interviewed ostensibly to push his new book, “The Daily Show: An Oral History,” but the waning Obama administration and the state of the left in America today seemed to be weighing far more heavily on his mind than a mere book tour.
Firstly Stewart slapped the left for its absurd habit of claiming everything people right of center do is motivated by raaaacism.
“Not everybody that voted for Trump is a racist,” Stewart insisted. “I don’t give a f*ck what any of you say to me. You can yell it at me, you can tweet it at me. They’re not all racists. Or they’re not giving tacit support to a racist system. We all give tacit support to exploitative systems as long as they don’t affect us that badly.”
He went on to slam Hillary Clinton saying she was “an unqualified Secretary of State because the way she handled classified material.” Though in the same breath he criticized Trump for considering disgraced General David Petraeus as a candidate for Secretary of State because Petraeus practically did the same thing when he was in government and it was the main reason he was cashiered from the Obama administration and sent home under the threat of prosecution.
Of course, Stewart may be overstating just how serious Trump is about adding Petraeus to his cabinet as so far the President-Elect has only taken a meeting with the former General and CIA Chief and no word has really leaked to say how serious that meeting was.
Stewart went on to attack the media for being overly concerned about presidential campaigns and less interested in what actually goes on while presidents and legislatures are governing. “They don’t give a flying fuck about governance, they care about campaigns and that’s where the fun is for them. That’s devastating. And not only is it devastating news-wise, it’s devastating to all of us,” he said.
He also gave Tea Party people a big pat on the back for being effective in politics all while liberals were sitting smugly at home and laughing at Stewart’s attacks on conservatives.
Stewart said he enjoyed making fun of conservatives and Tea Party types on his Daily Show, but the lesson was that, “while we were all passing around really remarkably eviscerating videos of the Tea Party — that we had all made great fun of — [they were] sitting off a highway at a Friendly’s taking over a local school board.”
Stewart’s point was that Tea Party folks were busy creating avenues to get their ideas into government through the actual use of power while liberals were sitting home doing nothing but watching TV.
Stewart added, “as much as I love what we did and I liked it, there is a self-satisfaction there that is unwarranted, unearned, and not useful.”
Stewart next slammed Black Lives Matter and social justice warriors for treating every center right and Trump voter as a wild-eyed racist.
This has to stop. This idea that we’re all … that our team is perfect and the other team is demons. And this is not like a Kumbaya, let’s all get along.
And I’ll say this, I know a lot of first responders. I spent a lot of time in that community. A sh*tload of them voted for Trump. The same people that voted for Trump ran into burning buildings and saved whoever the f*ck they could no matter what color they were, no matter what religion and they would do it again tomorrow. So, if you want to sit and tell me that those people are giving tacit approval to an exploitative system — I say, “OK, and would you put your life on the line for people who aren’t like you? Because they did.” I get mad about this stuff.
Stewart next took aim at President Obama for being one of the worst presidents ever for press freedom.
“I thought they were terrible for press freedom,” he said of the Obama regime. He then added, “I still am not quite sure I understand a centralized policy of spying and droning. Like, I don’t know.”
Stewart also cautioned liberals not to imagine that Trump, “that one guy,” could possibly destroy the whole country. “Maybe I’m naive or idiotic, but I feel like — when has this been easy? Fu*king buckle your seat belt and get ready,” he said.
Indeed, even as he held his interview example after example of what he warned about was going on or had been seen in the recent past.
Only weeks before his interview, for instance, liberals were calling Trump and his voters “racists.”
During Election Night coverage, far left former Obama appointee and now MSNBC analyst Van Jones was calling the pending election of Donald Trump a “whitelash” aimed at Barack Obama. Jones insisted that voters pulling the lever or Trump were all racists who were trying to vote against a black president and his legacy.
It didn’t seem to register with Jones that many of the voters voting for Trump in 2016 were the exact same people who voted for Obama twice! How they could twice vote to put a black man in the White House but then turn on a dime and become racists, Jones didn’t bother to explain… or even acknowledge.
Jones was at it again only a day ago when he made the idiotic claim that people like Trump who talk against terrorism are actually creating terrorism by talking so mean about Muslims. That mean talk, Jones laughingly said, drives Muslims to terror.
CNN’s Van Jones: Muslims turn to jihad “when people say stuff like Trump. Trump kind of helps make people radical” https://t.co/TQvWbGUK9I pic.twitter.com/Rn2g05QEI7
— Robert Spencer روبرت سبنسر (@jihadwatchRS) December 4, 2016
With this sort of reasoning empty of logic, Jones might be guilty of making the world a worse place himself. After all, Jones talks about “racists” every single day of his life. By his “logic” isn’t he creating racists by “driving” people to become racists?
In any case, Jon Stewart has a point about the shotgun approach of calling every Republican a racist. After all, doesn’t it create a “crying wolf” syndrome. If everyone is a racist, and doesn’t that dilute the perfidy of the real racists out there?
As to the issue of Obama being a scourge of freedom of the press, Stewart was again 100% correct.
During Obama regime, the U.S. has steadily fallen on the Cato Human Freedom Index because of Obama’s war on the rule of law.
This slip in the rankings is mostly due to the fact that businesses are being strangled by oppressive regulations and crushed by rampantly greedy unions. But it also due to the end of the rule of law in the US as government ignores laws, re-tools and warps them at will in order to feed its rapacious appetite for complete control of our lives. And most especially the sharp rise in abuse of eminent domain rules allowing government to steal private property on a whim has contributed to American’s loss of freedom.
But another aspect of that loss of standing is Obama’s constant attack on every aspect of the First Amendment from his war on Christianity, to his effort to limit speech in general, to his Stalinistic assault on the press.
One of the more egregious assaults on the press came in May of 2013 when President Obama had seized the phone records of over a hundred Associated Press reporters without conferring with the AP before he did so. Obama’s Department of “Justice” insisted that it was looking for government leakers, but no president has ever done anything this high-handed before.
But the AP phone record heist is far from the only example of Obama’s war on journalists.
In October of 2013, Leonard Downie, the Weil family professor of journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, noted that Obama has done something else no president has ever done. He has used the 1917 Espionage Act to justify using electronic surveillance against reporters without telling them or their news agencies that he’s doing so.
Press freedom has been so endangered that in 2013 CNN reporter Bob Franken said Obama was the most “hostile” to the media in US history.
Of course, you never heard of any of these stories because the press is so slavishly in love with Obama and they didn’t really want to advertise his abuse of the First Amendment. Naturally, if Bush had done this it would have been all you’d ever hear about.
That is far from the only attack on the First Amendment Obama perpetrated. Just to name a few more cases, Obama maintained that speaking ill of Islam could get you prosecuted (so much for freedom of speech), we all know how Obama moved to quash the religious freedom of Christians (so much for freedom of religion), and in 2014, Obama even took away the right of Americans to freely take photographs in our national parks by passing a rule that photographers must get permits to snap photos in our parks (so much for just regular ol’ freedom).
The last eight years have proven to be some of the worst years in American history shy of the great turmoil of the Civil War and the tumultuous years of the Great Depression. We’ve lost more freedom than at any time in modern history and Obama is still backloading this nation with his oppressive regulations in a mad rush to regulate our lives as he heads for the exits.
Indeed, Obama has set the record for the most regulations in American history.
So, when it comes to failure, Obama is one of the worst. And, though its hard to believe I’m saying this, Stewart has it right.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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