[spence]

Originally Posted by detbuch

Did Jon Stewart "nail it"? Or was he just, as you accuse Rush and his ilk of doing, being an entertainer prostituting himself for his sponsors (and making a bundle for himself in the process)?

I think Stewart was being pretty straightforward with this commentary.

It was a funny piece. But argument by humor can be deceptive. Starts out by tsk tsking Fox News (a competitor?) for its commentator saying, at the time, that no one had a problem with the mosque. Later, of course, Fox Network and News (as well as other networks who Stewart doesn't mention) had commentators discussing the "problem." As if that were some change of . . . of . . . I don't know of what. The first instance was reportage of conditions at the time. Things changed and Fox reported and discussed that. Tsk, tsk.

The conditions about the issue didn't change, just the controversy surrounding it and how some were just out to stir the pot as we've discussed here at length.

FOX may get special attention, but are they more guilty of promoting misleading or unfair accusations? While the video certainly isn't a detailed report on the issue, I can say I sure don't hear the kind of rhetoric (or it's inverse) on the other cable news networks.

Terrorist training center...there could be a Hamburg cell right downtown...And this is by FOX regulars...

Stewart says he can accept the symbolic argument against the mosque being there, then trots out some false analogies that are supposed to poo-poo the objections--the most telling being the Charlton Heston NRA thing. Because the Columbine whakos used guns, the NRA was being insensitive according to the liberals of the time? And this is analogous to the mosque situation? The columbine killers also ate food and slept in a bed. So a bed and breakfast convention should not be held at Columbine? A true analogy would have been if the killers were NRA members who killed in the name of the NRA and slaughtered the disbelievers of gun rights and NRA bylaws.

The Heston remarks really had nothing to do with the NRA. It was about letting the actions of a few dictate your policy toward the many.

It's a funny piece, as is the other U Tube video about Glen Beck Nazi Tourettes. Of course, that didn't actually discuss whether Beck was right or wrong about Beck's comparisons, just ridiculed them, not in a dispassioned, reasonable, methodical and demonstrative way (logical argument) but with great humor.

Sure it did, as he pointedly hammered on the shallowness of Beck's own attacks and how he's degraded the Nazi card to a cheap commodity.

Ridicule as a tactic, and feigned shock at hypocricy with facial expressions and body twitches are reminiscent of tactics discussed in another thread.

And god forbid it's employed by a comic. To think...the nerve.

-spence