The Daily Show

B’Man’s Hypocrite Watch: Rachel Maddow Towing The Corptocracy Line

David Edwards at Raw Story shared a clip from The Daily Show in an article named, “Stewart to Robertson: ‘Shut your pie hole, old man‘”, and added commentary about how Jon Stewart took  Pat Robertson apart with the words of The Book that Pat uses to control and manipulate people with. It is the same old religious hypocritical craziness that tears me a new butthole, as well. It is plain that these “Men of God” who “Follow Christ” wouldn’t know The Christ, if the man slapped them in the face with an olive branch.

But, I don’t want to get on the religious bashing subject today, but want to focus on the second part of that clip in which Mr Edwards made nary a mention of: how Jon Stewart also took apart Rachel Maddow and MSNBC for politicizing the very same thing.

Rachel made a deal with the devil, herself, to tow the corporate line for GE. It is obvious. I wonder why Mr Edwards totally ignored this part of the clip he highlighted.

With Miss Maddow, it is glaringly obvious when you see the second part of the clip (all of it is included just so you can see how Pat is a asshole, even tho Lynda already shared a clip in an earlier post):

more about “Video: Haiti Earthquake Reactions | T…“, posted with vodpod

UPDATE:

The Blog Queen posted a rebuttal letter from Satan to Pat in which the old devil takes Pat to task for lying about Satan being a welcher and a cheat. The funniest part, is that Satan describes America perfectly:

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action.

But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.

Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?

If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.

You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

B’Man’s Hypocrite Watch: Glenn Beck And The Greatest HealthCare Rip-Off In The World

Do you keep hearing the nutbags keep telling us that we have the greatest healthcare in the world? Seems like there is a penchant for uttering such easily destroyed claims by the fools trying to bullshit you, my fellow rednecks. If you are listening to Rush or Hannity, you are hearing about the horrible healthcare elsewhere in the world and how we have the best, you have to start asking yourself the questions like, If U.S. Health Care’s So Good, Why Do Other People Live Longer (h/t AfterDowningStreet originally at McClatchy):

By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg | Sacramento Bee

Ask around for the healthiest country in the world, and the United States won’t come close to topping the list.

People live longer in just about every industrialized nation, from Canada to our north, throughout much of Europe, and around the Pacific in Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

New mothers and their babies also face a rockier start here, with U.S. infant and maternal death rates double some of our industrialized peers.

As debate swirls in Washington and at town halls nationwide over health care reform, there is also a more fundamental question — what about health?

Could policymakers change our medical system in ways that would make America a healthier country?

Of course, there are things that each and every American can do to help themselves be healthier (eat healthier, exercise, etc) and the McClatchy article reports that having more and better access to Primary care is instrumental:

Among them are strengthening primary care, finding ways to encourage better diet and exercise, and effectively reforming how health care is financed, said Dr. James G. Kahn, a professor of health policy and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

People do better in nations that encourage them to have a regular primary care provider, Kahn said, perhaps partly because regular, front-line care helps bolster healthy habits.

“Even in the United States, in locations with a higher concentration of primary care providers, people have somewhat better outcomes and also lower costs,” he said.

Generally speaking, one can estimate that the more someone spends on something, the better he will fair. But in the US HealthCare Complex, this seems to be the opposite. The more we spend, the worse care we get. Bernard at A Tiny Revolution explains:

Rip Off Inc. II

By: Bernard Chazelle

The US spends at least twice as much per person on health care as any other country on earth.

In the 70s, American social scientists introduced the concept of “amenable mortality,” which tallies “the number of deaths from certain causes before age 75 that are potentially preventable with timely and effective health care.”

In a study of 19 countries, including the US, 14 Western European countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, the US ranks dead last.

According to the authors, if the U.S. had been able reduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved by the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths annually by the end of the study period.No doubt those hard-working doctors, insurers, hospital administrators, and drug manufacturers deserve their hard-earned pennies.

If there is nothing else you take away from this post, realize that the people on the TeeVee that you trust so much and think are “Patriots” are nothing more than shills earning their money. Just like Glenn Beck, depending on who is paying his bills, CNN or FOX, totally depends upon how he thinks about his healthcare, telling me that maybe FOX has better coverage or Beck is a liar (of course, Beck is a liar):

Drag Me to Health – Universal Health Care

How Jon Stewart Went From Hero To Zero To Appease The Elite

The Daily Show has been one of the few shows on TV that I actually look forward to seeing. When I heard that he was going to have Clifford May on, I thought, “Cool. Now Jon can show this numbskull to the world for what he truly is… a neocon mouthpiece with zero credibility.

During the interview they had a bit of a heated discussion where Jon, when asked if Harry Truman was a war criminal for dropping the nukes of Japan, answered, “yes”.

Dayum!

I couldn’t believe it and after only a few seconds of self-consideration of his point (that Truman could have set a bomb off 25 miles off the coast and then warn the Japanese that the next would be on the mainland and this could have stopped the aggression and the avoided killing all of those people).

The next day (maybe two later) he comes on and apologizes for those remarks.

But as I think more clearly on the subject, of course he is correct. Truman could and SHOULD have done what Jon suggests. He didn’t and mercilessly killed untold numbers of people (on that fateful day and for decades to follow). He truly conducted a war crime… one that is likely one of the largest war crimes in all of human history that occurred in such a small amount of time (of course there were millions of Jews killed over years and years of the Nazi criminality).

But this isn’t about comparing war crimes. This is about naming and claiming what is the truth. Jon named it, claimed it, then back tracked.

The question becomes why and I read an article today that somewhat explains it.

From Anti-War.com:

Jon Stewart: Wimp, Wuss, Moral Coward

Can a Democrat commit war crimes? Of course not!

by Justin Raimondo, May 06, 2009

I was a bit surprised, albeit pleasantly, to see Jon Stewart nail Harry Truman as a war criminal. After all, Stewart is a typical Hollywood liberal, whose politics are by now a staple of the corporate, anodyne culture that permeates the airwaves, and this naturally excludes everything that might challenge the liberal groupthink that constitutes the conventional wisdom in the Age of Obama.

Certainly, in “respectable” quarters, criticism of anything or anyone connected to the great liberal “anti-fascist” crusade, the “Good War,” is strictly verboten, and surely an intelligent guy like Stewart knows this. Yet – contrary to what he said later – this wasn’t an argument that arose in the heat of the moment, in the context of a robust discussion with obnoxious neocon Clifford May on the alleged merits of torture.

No, Stewart had apparently thought this one out, at least to some extent, because when May asked him if he thought Truman was a war criminal for nuking two Japanese cities, he didn’t just say “Yes” – he went into a whole riff about how, if we had first demonstrated the power of this new weapon on an uninhabited atoll somewhere, and then informed the Japanese government that they’d better surrender, or else that would happen in Japan, then and only then would it be okay to drop the Big One. The audience cheered him on, as he took apart the frenetically hysterical May, whose ferret-like features and organizational affiliations make him the perfect spokesman for a policy described by Stewart as “temporary insanity.” Yet, a few days later, Stewart was back to the same subject, minus the rabid ferret, this time reversing his stance – and apologizing for calling the little haberdasher a war criminal.

My, that was quick.

Alas, apparently not quick enough for the executives at whatever network Stewart appears on – yes, I know, I have to be the only person in America who doesn’t watch his show – who no doubt would have preferred that he never said it at all. It was clearly the execs who reined in the freethinking Stewart and laid down the law, and the first law of “controversial,” “provocative,” and indubitably “edgy” television commentary is to never – ever, ever! – allow a deviation from the conventional wisdom that falls outside the contemporary Left/Right paradigm.

Rule number one in this game is that everybody must play their assigned role. You’ve always got to be “in character.” If you’re on the Left, you can take on George W. Bush, murderer of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – but not Harry Truman, killer of even larger numbers of innocent Japanese civilians. Rightists regularly excoriate the crimes of Stalin, yet they are expected to remain silent when it comes to war crimes committed by the U.S., such as the “Phoenix program” during the Vietnam conflict – and they rarely disappoint.

This enforcement of a dubious double standard, by the way, goes beyond the issue of war crimes and mass murder. If you’re on the Right, you’re allowed to express unlimited disdain for the thuggish Hugo Chavez – indeed, it’s a veritable obligation – but even a hint of contempt for the equally thuggish Benjamin Netanyahu and his neo-fascist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, will earn you enough brickbats to build a Wall of Separation between your ideological comrades and yourself. Likewise, lefties are allowed to cuddle up to Fidel Castro while inveighing against Augusto Pinochet.

In any case, Stewart’s apology was embarrassing: for him, for the studio audience (which giggled nervously, and inappropriately, at awkward intervals), and for me. As he looked into the camera and babbled about how wrong he was – without giving a single reason, never mind a good one – you could almost see his strings being pulled by his corporate masters.

So let’s see if I get this straight: it is not okay to torture a member of al-Qaeda, who no doubt has information we need in order to stop terrorist attacks. Instead, we have to treat him as a prisoner of war according to the rules laid down by the Geneva Conventions. On the other hand, it is okay to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in cold blood, to incinerate entire cities and poison the land for generations to come, as long as your name is Harry Truman.

Am I getting this right so far?

I have stayed away from the torture “debate” for a number of reasons, because, after all, the issue isn’t debatable. Not in a civilized country, that is. We might as well debate the merits and demerits of infanticide or coprophagia. Normal people don’t argue about these things; they simply turn away in revulsion.

Another reason for my abstention from this ongoing brouhaha – which seems to have consumed the left wing of the blogosphere ever since Obama took office – is that there is something remarkably phony about the high moral dudgeon of the liberals when it comes to this non-question. How much moral moxie does it really take to come out, guns blazing, against torture? I mean, you don’t have to be a saint or anything to enlist in a campaign to ban pulling off the fingernails of defenseless prisoners, you just have to be halfway normal.

Furthermore, there is another reason to be suspicious of the liberals-against-torture campaign that now monopolizes the capacity of certain pundits for outrage: the amount of noise being generated about this issue very effectively – and conveniently – drowns out opposition to the rest of Bush’s ugly legacy, principally the ongoing occupation of Iraq and Obama’s escalation of the “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Exhausted by their 24/7 calls to expunge the stain of torture from America’s conscience – which is to be accomplished, supposedly, by trying Bush, Cheney, and the Republican gang for war crimes – the liberals have no moral energy to take on Obama’s wars.

Thus what passes for the Left in the America of 2009 is perfectly happy to make demands they know will never be met and rail against a practice that even those who advocate it in certain circumstances seem uneasy about. It’s so much easier than coming out against the foreign policy of a popular president whom liberals regard as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King combined.

It doesn’t seem to matter that those policies are murderous, just as Bush’s were, and potentially even more disastrous for the U.S. in terms of “blowback.” If we are signing on to an occupation of Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan that will make our activities in Iraq seem like the briefest of episodes, then liberals of the Kossack/Huffington Post/Jon Stewart sort don’t want to hear about it. That’s because they’re okay with it – as long as we don’t torture people individually, you see, by making them think they’re drowning or throwing them against a wall. Obama’s in the White House, and all’s right with the world!

Once Dear Leader has determined that it’s imperative we actually kill people en masse, for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the defense of the United States, as we are doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan – well, then, it’s nothing to get too excited about. Indeed, it’s actually praiseworthy, positively Truman-esque – and we all know what a heroic figure the gnome-like machine politician Truman was!

Cliff May and his ilk know what side they’re on, they know what they believe and what they want, and they are quick to home in on the many contradictions of ostensibly antiwar liberals like Stewart, whose instincts are good, but who don’t know anything but the permitted pieties about America’s role and actions during World War II. That’s why liberals are rendered practically speechless by ritualized neocon invocations of “Hitler” and “Munich” every time a supposedly deadly threat to the U.S. arises somewhere in the world.

For a moment, however, Stewart saw through the veil of myth and prejudice (yes, racial prejudice) that obscures the truth about what we did to Japan, which was ready to make peace on reasonable terms. Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender, upheld by Truman, rationalized mass murder on a scale never before seen, and at the time the liberals fell right into line, with nary a pip or a squeak from any of them.

It was inside the military and the U.S. government that dissent raised its head. Truman’s decision went against the advice of Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight David Eisenhower, not to mention his own secretaries of state and the Navy. In 1963, Eisenhower told Newsweek: “The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Oh, but please don’t confuse us with the introduction of needless facts. What are you, one of those obstructionist Republican extremists? In the wake of Stewart’s faux pas and subsequent Soviet-style self-criticism, one thing is clear: measures must be taken. It is necessary – in this, the Age of Obama – to establish a firm doctrine from which no one, no matter how popular, how “provocative,” or how “edgy” they might be, is allowed to dissent, and it is this: no Democratic president can ever be guilty of a war crime. No, not even Lyndon “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Johnson. Which means Obama has a license to obliterate Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran (as his secretary of state said she would like to do), and we can get on with the important business of conducting political show trials of our favorite Republican villains.

And all’s right with the world…

To conclude: yes, Stewart is a wimp, a wuss, and a moral coward – but he’s very far from alone.

B’Man’s Hypocrite Watch: When Dictionaries Aren’t Available…

God, that must really hurt when they are forced to actually “think”. The McBushies aren’t used to that.

Why Minnesota? It’s The Clandestine Gay Sex, Of Course

B’Man’s Hypocrite Watch: Preposterously Presumptuous Presidential Pretender Pawns

The Ultimate Self-Realization of One’s Full-of-Shitness

Senator Chuck Grassley thinks the Senate needs a laxative for its constipation.