Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Monday May 11 2015, @03:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-is-your-talking-head dept.

Reuters tells us:

As Jon Stewart winds down his 19-year stint as host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, he and Stephen Colbert sit at the peak of American punditry despite their left-leaning view of life, the universe and everything.

In an era of diffused voices and divided politics, they are well known, widely admired, and speak to Americans in ways that no one else does, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

This poll tracks 10 different pundits. Split evenly between conservative and liberal. It is also worth noting that four of the five on the liberal side are comedians, while none of the conservative pundits are trained to tell jokes.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday May 11 2015, @07:26PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday May 11 2015, @07:26PM (#181596) Journal

    Just one thing about calling Jon Stewart left leaning. The right had some good points, but in recent decades they have bogged themselves down in a big swamp where there is no difference between facts and propaganda. It's so bad that many of them aren't sure whether facts matter! There's plenty to criticize about the left, but the right has gone off the rails, abandoned facts, and made themselves unable and unworthy to balance the left. The balance is broken. It's become very hard to think and act rationally and be thought a conservative.

    The party of Abraham Lincoln really began dying in the 1960s when 2 things happened: LBJ lead the Democrats into giving up the South to end Jim Crow and enact the Voting Rights law. The fool Republicans embraced what the Democrats gave up. That the position was in a metaphorical swamp and one they should not have touched with a 10 foot pole didn't matter, they only saw votes and happily waved Confederate flags and wore KKK uniforms in front of crowds they thought would like that sort of thing. Anyone who accuses Democrats of flip-flopping ought to think about that whopper of a flip-flop. Abe must have turned over in his grave.

    The other cancer in the Republican party was the embrace of religious conservatives, starting with Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy for 1964. Republicans used to see value in science and research if only as a means of winning wars. The atom bomb, Allied code breaking successes, and weapons engineering all showed the power of knowledge and science. The moon landings reiterated that. Now they are full of religious fundamentalists who want to wear blinders so that they might not see things that might contradict their beliefs. Projects like the Hubble Space Telescope do not appear to have any immediate military use and threaten to reveal things that might be distasteful and challenge dogma. They've turned the party so anti-science that they can scarcely twitch without banging into another contradiction they created. To overcome those problems they've had to not just play stupid, but embrace and become the stupid. Thus the turn towards propaganda, because honest facts won't do.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=3, Interesting=1, Total=4
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Monday May 11 2015, @09:09PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Monday May 11 2015, @09:09PM (#181648)

    LBJ lead the Democrats into giving up the South to end Jim Crow and enact the Voting Rights law.

    As you were saying about confusing fact and propaganda. Here ya go again. What if everything you were taught about that part of history were provably wrong?

    Lets start with the big one. What if LBJ didn't switch from fillibustering civil rights legislation to promoting it as a plank in the Great Society because he was a grinchy racist whose heart grew two sizes that day... but was instead just a grinchy racist who had an especially grinchy plan. Combined with the welfare state, civil rights would be a meaningless feint and add up to an enslavement better than any of his prior cross burning associates could have ever dreamed. With the extra evil bonus of having his victims voting for their victimization.

    What if your, despite being popular wisdom, theory of the 'Souther Strategy' is total bunk. Lets go to the tape. At the Presidential level, the Strategy is most often leveled at Nixon. Regardless of his many sins, political naif is not one commonly leveled against him. We are expected to have forgotten enough history to make plausible the idea that a progressive Republican from CA would be able to make Southern racist Democrats (remember, they would vote for a yeller dog over any damned Republican) suddenly shift their vote to him over the Dixicrat candidate running as a stalking horse for the exact purpose of providing a safe harbor for racists who were angry at the Democrats. As for Reagan, his victory in the South is unremarkable because he was racking up unprecedented victories EVERYWHERE. On the Senate, Congressional, Governors, state legislatures and local politics the South remained a One Party region for decades beyond LBJ, the conversion to Republican rule didn't even really begin in earnest for twenty plus years after LBJ so it is pretty hard to attribute it to anything he did.

    As for the anti-religious bigotry, I'm just going to let that stand on its own, can't really improve on it by dissecting it. Guess we know where the bigots still live... where they always did.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2015, @09:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2015, @09:39PM (#181659)

      What if your, despite being popular wisdom, theory of the 'Souther Strategy' is total bunk.

      Only one thing to say, what if it is not? Wait a minute, are you projecting the anti-Anthropogenic Global Warming strategy?

      As for the anti-religious bigotry, I'm just going to let that stand on its own,

      But you see, it is not bigotry when it is anti-stupidity; we are talking about people who are only religious because they would be opening raping and murdering (instead of trying to not get caught), and because it gives them cover for being racists (which is the real point of the "maybe it is real" Southern Strategy).

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 12 2015, @12:34AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 12 2015, @12:34AM (#181722) Journal

        But you see, it is not bigotry when it is anti-stupidity

        Right. So how much did you say that bridge was again?

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2015, @03:05AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2015, @03:05AM (#181767)

      As for the anti-religious bigotry

      This is one of those great new conservative tactics - label the opposition as what conservatives are actually guilty of doing. They're doing right now with their hatred of marriage equality, calling those who oppose their intolerance of same sex marriage as intolerant. Religion, especially the conservative brand of it, is a bastion of bigotry.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 12 2015, @04:25AM

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday May 12 2015, @04:25AM (#181787) Journal

      Not at all anti-religious. I am decrying stupidity in the name of religion, not religion itself. These religious fundamentalists who want to teach Intelligent Design/Creationism in science class as if it was a valid theory are an embarrassment to Christianity. Despite all the noise they make, their faith is very weak, based as it is on events and signs that they take as scientific-like proof, rather than the knowledge that the supernatural is not provable and therefore one must instead rely on faith. So they see science and religion as enemies and opposites. Very 1 dimensional "if you're not with us, you're against us" thinking.

      As for bigotry, try the Westboro Baptist Church.

      LBJ's action took a good twenty years to trickle down and send the southerners into the welcoming arms of the GOP big tent. Nixon and Ford were the last of the pragmatic, pro-business Republican leaders, basically in the same mold as Eisenhower. Bush senior was at heart a politician, going whichever way the wind blew. He would have been pro-business, but he meekly followed the path Reagan had taken. Dole also pandered to the religious fundamentalists. Bush junior did much more than merely pander, he wholeheartedly embraced them, made himself and the Republican party one with them.

      Junior's presidency was one disastrous and stupid mistake and misstep after another. It was the worst since Hoover. Makes Nixon's Watergate troubles look small and petty. 9/11 was perhaps when he was at his best. He should have stopped there with the warring, but he didn't. The War of Choice is enough to forever mar his record, but there is also the economy. It could be argued that the Dot Com crash wasn't really his fault as he hadn't been in office very long when that broke, but the Great Recession most certainly was. What I find hilarious is how the Republicans contort the facts to blame the Great Recession on Clinton and even Carter! Republicans were the ones who championed market deregulation which figured prominently among the causes of the market crash of 2008. Then there were all kinds of anti-science moves, such as the ban on stem cell research, the propaganda campaign to deny that there was Climate Change, and giving a closet Creationist, George Deutsch, authority over top scientists. They tried to impose their morals on others, by being hostile to abortions, homosexuals, and interfering with the Terry Schiavo case.

      It's going to take years for the Republicans to recover from all that. They weakened and discredited themselves so much that they could not stop Obamacare. It's possible they won't recover, and the Republicans will collapse as the Whigs did in the 19th century. A natural constituency for them is Hispanics, most of whom are more devout than whites, but the idiots have alienated them by lumping them in with illegal aliens who must be kicked out immediately. What then, if they collapse? Will the Democrats become the right leaning party, facing off against a left leaning coalition of Greens and Pirates?