Jon Stewart Goes MAGA
It will never cease to amuse me that Tucker Carlson has the biggest show on cable TV and Jon Stewart has the occasional guest spot on Colbert. Stewart was a liberal hero for mocking and insulting Carlson to his face all those years ago, and a lot of people even credit Stewart for the subsequent cancellation of Crossfire. But oh, how things have changed. That’s life. That’s what all the people say.
And now it gets even better, because Carlson and Stewart are actually agreeing on something that’s fairly important!
Ladies and gentlemen: The keynote speaker of CPAC 2022.
It starts off all smiles and bro-hugs with Colbert and the band, but then Stewart goes there…
I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic… which was more than likely caused by science.
[NERVOUS LAUGHTER]
“Oh my god, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China! What do we do?”
“Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab.”The disease is the same name as the lab! That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?
And then they ask those scientists, “So wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. How did this happen?” And they’re like, “Hmmm, a pangolin kissed a turtle?… Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey, and then it sneezed into my chili, and now we all have coronavirus!”…
“Oh my god, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened?”
“Oh, I dunno, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.”
“Or, it’s the f***in’ chocolate factory!”
A year ago — hell, a few weeks ago — you’d be ousted from polite society if you dared to say any of this in public. You’d get kicked off social media and scratched from every guest list in the civilized world. Now Jon Stewart is saying it on network TV. He’s a professional comedian with many, many decades of experience, so he says it in an entertaining way. But clearly he also means it.
And in rebuttal, Colbert has got… not much. All he can do is compare his friend Jon Stewart to his enemy Ron Johnson. Jon isn’t saying what his own tribe wants to hear, so now maybe he’s one of those people. Now the libs are sharpening their knives.
If you’re reading this, Tucker, please don’t invite Jon on your show to talk about this. The explosion of lib heads all over the world would be deadlier than any virus.
At least now Jon has something to talk about with Dennis Miller.
Whatever I might think of Colbert and his boring liberal ilk, it’s nice to see talk shows with live audiences again. I would never want to sit in that crowd and perform on command every time a stagehand flashes the APPLAUSE sign, but NYC tourists should have that option.
Right now the ex-president who’s despised by late-night TV would be reminding America that he’s the one responsible for this return to normalcy, if he hadn’t been kicked off Twitter.
But what is that right-wing kook Jon Stewart so worried about, anyway? We can definitely trust China!
So, What Else Is Going On?
Somebody needs to jumpstart Joe Biden’s brain.
Ol’ Joe also keeps confusing Syria and Libya, because he can’t be expected to keep track of every single little country he’s helped ruin during his half-century in Washington. And he’s forgetting stuff he was told just 30 seconds before.
Look, the guy is 78 years old. Here at the beginning of Biden’s first and only term, he’s already six months older than Reagan was when he left the White House. At this point the man’s brain is a shriveled avocado and there’s no going back. Joe isn’t going to get better. That’s not how time works. The only dude in history who ever got more lucid each day was Benjamin Button. This is elder abuse. Biden’s minders can’t just keep pushing him out there in front of the whole world and—
Oh yeah, I forgot. Never mind.
Batman is always in really good shape, or at least most versions of him are. (Sorry, Adam.) I’ve always assumed he’s on a very strict diet. So it’s not too surprising that, according to DC Comics, there’s one thing Bruce Wayne absolutely will not eat. (Sorry, Catwoman.)
The Caped Crusader should really reconsider, though. If he’s worried about the waistline of his Bat-pants, that particular snack is very low-carb. And if he wants to avoid feline AIDS, he can keep his utility belt stocked with Bat Dental Dams. C’mon, DC, start thinking outside the box. Or, as the case may be, inside it.
Chrissy Teigen has written a big long post about how sorry she is for being mean to people online for no reason. I still have no idea why she’s famous, but she seems to be sincerely regretful and self-reflective about her behavior. It’s worth reading if you want to understand the mind of a troll:1
“Life has made me more empathetic. I’m more understanding of what motivates trolling — the instant gratification that you get from lashing out and clapping back, throwing rocks at someone you think is invincible because they’re famous.”
There’s that. And some people are just dicks.
Sure, Teigen is insanely wealthy for reasons I’ll never understand, but she’s still a human being. If she’s genuinely not an A-hole anymore, I’m willing to let bygones be bygones and go back to ignoring her.
If a fictional character in a novel makes a joke that hurts your feelings, what should you do? Previous generations might have given unacceptable answers like “Nothing” or “Read another book” or “I’m too busy trying not to die before 30.” But today’s readers aren’t nearly so careless and insensitive. They know it’s up to them to protect the rest of us from exposure to reading material that might hurt our feelings.
As Kyle Smith at NRO notes, a romance author named Elin Hilderbrand recently put an Anne Frank joke in the mouth of one of the characters in her novel Golden Girl.2 Hilderbrand was then scolded for the joke on her Instagram page by one (1) of her readers, and now she’s promising to remove that line of dialogue from the digital version of the book and all future editions. This sort of thing is happening more and more often.
Which… seems like a bad idea, right? Authors shouldn’t have to apologize for any dialogue they write for fictional characters.3 That’s why it’s called fiction. It’s not real. It’s just a story. It can only hurt you if you let it.
And authors definitely shouldn’t capitulate to the whims of their most vocal readers. People complain online all the time, because there’s nothing easier and it doesn’t cost the complainer a damn thing.
If they don’t like it, they don’t have to read it. Why encourage them to keep messing with you?
Remember when right-wingers were the humorless, censorious scolds, and left-wingers were the ones telling them to lighten up? Maybe the next generation will flip back to that. No wonder even North Korean refugees think 2021 America is nuts.
That also goes for movie stars and their relationship with moviegoers. Yesterday I told you about Tom Hanks going woke, which is a big mistake because now he’ll never be woke enough to satisfy the activists to whom he’s groveling. Somebody will always want more, because that’s the whole game.
Charles C. W. Cooke at NRO breaks it down:
Tom Hanks could announce tomorrow that he intends to spend the rest of his life making films of which Eric Deggans approves, and within hours he would be accused of taking up spaces that belong to black actors, writers, producers, and directors; within days, it would be said that he was undermining important “voices of color”; and within a month, he’d be charged with possession of a “white savior complex.”
That’s exactly right. Tom Hanks always plays white guys, because… uh, he’s a white guy. Now he’s being criticized for that, but I doubt his new crop of critics would like it if he pulled any shenanigans like this:
Damned if ya do, damned if ya don’t. Hanks was better off keeping his trap shut about current sociopolitical issues and just making movies people want to see. Now he’s stuck trying to please a handful of people whose careers depend on never being pleased. They have no incentive to give him a break because there’s no money in that. It’s like giving a kid a cookie and thinking you’re done talking about cookies.
Let this be a lesson to all of us: Activists, BLM and otherwise, aren’t scolding the rest of us for honest reasons, and we don’t owe them a damn thing.
Speaking of the R-word, as Robert Downey Jr. did so memorably in Tropic Thunder: Now Chuck Schumer is in trouble for saying it. He wasn’t insulting anybody. He was just talking about retarded children. “Retarded” is a perfectly acceptable word, and there’s nothing wrong with it just because some people use it as an insult.
On the other hand, Schumer is a miserable creep and I don’t like him. So let him enjoy his time in the barrel while his constituents yell at him. This is what it feels like when you do it to us, Chuck!
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People accuse me of trolling all the time, usually when they’ve lost an argument. So I always point out that if they think I’m trolling them, the last thing they should do is take the bait. That can solve the problem, at least with the smarter ones. Most of them are not the smarter ones.
No, the book doesn’t have anything to do with Betty White or Rue McClanahan. They were actually funny.
Unless it’s Stephen King. He should apologize for almost all the dialogue in almost all of his novels. Who talks like that? Not Earthlings.