In Stewart’s hour-long interview on The Rachel Maddow Show was remarkable for Stewart’s unprecedented openness about where he stands when he’s not making jokes. Because Stewart respects Maddow, he took her up on her invitation to clarify the message many believed he sent out at his “Rally To Restore Sanity”: That there’s a parity of invective on
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Like, just for example, he didnt appear to really listen to the point Rachel was making about disruptive Tea Partiers at town hall meetings being pre-organized stunts meant to deliberately disrupt DISCOURSE. It was a point rather in line with his whole "omg you guise stop yelling" thesis, yet, Jon opted to act as if the town hall disruptions (1) werent organized stunts meant to do the very thing he says is a problem -- undermine/disrupt civil discourse, and (2) gave these disruptive, posturing tea partiers a *pass* for stomping their feet/yelling, as if they are genuinely marginalized voices -- a pass he somehow does not feel comfortable extending to actual marginalized political movements left of center on the [U.S.] ideological spectrum, and instead somehow equates them with powerful hegemonies if they so much as raise their voices.
*head-scratch*
What Jon characterized as Maddow handling Tea Party townhall disruptions as "dismissiveness" was actually just debunking the credibility of a particular political stunt. Like, how does one be insensitively "dismissive" of something that's fabricated, and thus lacks credibility to begin with? It's Jon's recent penchant for false referring all over again.
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As seems to be his pattern since the rally, I think Jon is coming from a stance of "The specifics of what is happening aren't as important as finding out exactly why it's happening." The point I understood him to be making was, "These people might be individuals being played by powerful ideological organizations, but they are part of a movement of genuine anger. So let's try to figure out why these people are so angry instead of dismissing the Tea Party as a whole."
I don't think his problem was so much the specifics of the townhall interruptions, but the tendency overall to delegitimize the root concerns of Tea Partiers and dismiss the Tea Party as a bunch of crazies.
I don't feel like he articulated it well at all, but taken in context with all his other comments, I feel like that's what he was getting at.
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If Jon's point is that we need to get past the specifics and find out why exactly normal people are angry over any given issue instead of just dismissing them, then what--by his own position--is up with his own "dismissive" comments about Code Pink and people who refer to GWB as a "war criminal"? Why would he opt to peg them as part of the 'insanity' that the rally was taking a stand against, instead of empathetically acknowledging the basis for the rhetoric used by those groups of angry people, i.e., a presumably genuine place of anger?
That's more what I scratch my head at.
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I think that, because he was talking with an MSNBC host, he felt they both already understood the genuine basis for the war criminal comments and Code Pink, and his point was that they need to extend the same courtesy to the Tea Party. I feel like if he were talking to, say, a Fox News host, he would've approached it from the opposite angle, i.e. we need to try to understand the genuine basis behind Code Pink and the war criminal comments.
Actually I think a big part of this whole kerfuffle comes from the fact that Jon keeps modifying, not his message, but the articulation of his message, according to whom he's addressing it to, which leads to confusion about what his actual intentions are.
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A comedy show can be dismissive in it's humor, but a news show should be factual and report-y... Satirical political humor is great, don't get me wrong, but it really isn't going to educate anyone other than people who already going to agree with a specific joke, because when you are snarky about something someone likes, it's not a compelling argument to them. the attitude used at Fox even by the less biased folks like Chris Matthews isn't going to make me listen to them, even though they *might* actually report real news.
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