Jon Stewart jokes about ‘GOP dream’ of taking back America

posted at 3:21 pm on October 19, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Culture ]   

A Pew poll conducted in 2009 found that 21% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 got the bulk of their presidential campaign news from The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live.

Despite Jon Stewart’s frequent reminders to his audience that his is a “fake news show,” a slightly heated on-air clash in June with FOX News Channel’s Chris Wallace suggests the Comedy Central host takes himself and his politics more seriously than he lets on.

So when he poked fun last night at conservatives for their recent calls to “take back America,” you could tell Stewart was only half joking. (Video clip is here.) Even when he went out of his way to riff on Rep. Allen West’s impassioned plea to pick up “your muskets,” Stewart himself understood that the reference was an historical metaphor even if his guffawing studio audience didn’t.

Today Mediaite devotes some space to the segment and to Stewart’s ironic question of who those on the right are trying to take the country back from. A related question that the host might want to devote another hilarious segment to is to who those on the left are trying to take the country back from.

He might want to begin with Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy, who offers a recipe for “How Progressives Can Take Back America” in an article with the same name.

Too obscure? Then how about crazy man Howard Dean, whose 2004 book is titled Winning Back America? Or better still the radical-left Take Back the American Dream (formerly “Take Back America”) conference. Dean was keynote speaker at the group’s conference in 2004, where he told those in attendance:

So over the next few months we’re going to partner with 21st Century Democrats, with the Progressive Majority, with SEIU, with AFSCME, with other groups, where we can come together not just to make sure John Kerry is the next president of the United States, but to make sure that if he is, that this is not just simply a weigh station in between right-wing presidents. That we are going to take this country back this time, and never again are we going to permit the extreme right wing of the Republican Party to tell us what to do. I am tired of listening to the fundamentalist preachers, and we’re not going to do it anymore. [Emphasis added]

An even better Daily Show guest would be the man who told an auditorium full of fellow progressives in 2006:

We are here tonight because we believe that in this country, we have it within our power to say ‘yes’ to those questions—to forge our own destiny—to begin the world anew.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is our time.

Our time to make a mark on history.

Our time to write a new chapter in the American story.

Our time to leave our children a country that is freer and kinder, more prosperous and more just than the place we grew up.

And then someday, someday, if our kids get the chance to stand where we are and look back at the beginning of the 21st century, they can say that this was the time when America renewed its purpose.

They can say that this was the time when America found its way.

They can say that this was the time when America learned to dream again.

Were you able to guess from the florid prose that the speaker was the current progressive-in-chief, Barack Obama?

Mediaite, at the close of its article, quotes Jon Stewart as saying (with his tongue embedded, as ever, only halfway in his cheek):

It must be tough to love America so much, but hate almost three fourths of the people living in it.

Since conservatives still outnumber liberals in this country by a margin of better than two to one, it’s hard to know who Stewart was talking about. Could it be he was looking in a mirror when he made this sage observation?

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