"Unwarranted, unearned, and not useful.”

Jon Stewart, who influenced a lot of low information voters who got their "news" from watching the Daily Show, gives an interview to the New York Times and admits,

“And the lesson there is,” he continued, referencing the Daily Show, “as much as I love what we did and I liked it, there is a self-satisfaction there that is unwarranted, unearned, and not useful.”

Stewart scorned social justice warriors who’ve demonized Trump supporters as racists and homophobic and sexists.

“This has to stop,” Stewart said. “This idea that we’re all … that our team is perfect and the other team is demons. And this is not like a Kumbaya, let’s all get along.” He added:

And I’ll say this, I know a lot of first responders. I spent a lot of time in that community. A shitload of them voted for Trump. The same people that voted for Trump ran into burning buildings and saved whoever the fuck they could no matter what color they were, no matter what religion and they would do it again tomorrow. So, if you want to sit and tell me that those people are giving tacit approval to an exploitative system ― I say, ‘OK, and would you put your life on the line for people who aren’t like you? Because they did.’ I get mad about this stuff.

Read more here.

Personifying liberal smugness

Gerard Alexander makes some good points in The New York Times about The Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness, Jon Stewart.

His prodigious talents — he was smart and funny, and even more of both when he was mad — perfectly positioned him to purge a particular smugness from our discourse. Instead, he embodied it.

Many liberals, but not conservatives, believe there is an important asymmetry in American politics. These liberals believe that people on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum are fundamentally different. Specifically, they believe that liberals are much more open to change than conservatives, more tolerant of differences, more motivated by the public good and, maybe most of all, smarter and better informed.

The evidence for these beliefs is not good. Liberals turn out to be just as prone to their own forms of intolerance, ignorance and bias. But the beliefs are comforting to many. They give their bearers a sense of intellectual and even moral superiority. And they affect behavior. They inform the condescension and self-righteousness with which liberals often treat conservatives. They explain why many liberals have greeted Tea Partiers and other grass-roots conservatives with outsize alarm.

And Mr. Stewart, who signed off from “The Daily Show” on Thursday, was more qualified than anybody to puncture this particular pretension. He trained his liberal-leaning audience to mock hypocrisy, incoherence and stupidity, and could have nudged them to see the planks in their own eyes, too. Instead, he cultivated their intellectual smugness by personifying it.

...He could have made the liberals in his audience more open to dialogue across the great left/right divide by asking them to examine themselves more carefully and to admit that both ideological camps contain fools. Instead, he was a cultural entrepreneur who provided those viewers with the validation they wanted.

...After all those years, the comedian turned liberal standard-bearer still didn’t really comprehend the conservatives on the other side of the divide. Worse, he didn’t help his liberal viewers better understand themselves.

Read more here.

Love child's charm offensive

Petty Woman

Conservative alternatives?

Patterico writes,

SNL barely matters these days, although it may have hurt Sarah Palin. The Jon Stewarts and Stephen Colberts have the pull that SNL had in the 70′s when it didn’t suck all the time. But until conservatives can come up with the conservative alternative to the Jon Stewarts and Stephen Colberts, we’re going to keep losing young people.

Lorne Michaels of SNL recently told an interviewer that Republicans can take a joke better than Democrats.