Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show, so he's doing some summing up within his segments these days. As part of his response to Fox's reaction to his leaving, he sums up exactly what's been going on for years: the "conservative" or rabid right movement has been jihading reality for being insufficiently rabid right, and most everyone has been appeasing them.
But as he says, they will never be satisfied by any appeasement, only complete surrender--only a rabid right reality. That they intend to take the rest of us down with them into their self-destructive pit of ignorance and insanity is no secret. They'll literally destroy the planet as we know it to make their points. But the extent to which our institutions and zeitgeist are cooperating is almost as bad.
And even if he's exaggerating a bit, I believe there's truth in it when he says that one reason he is leaving The Daily Show-the most consistent bulwark against the rabid right, using the best weapons ( truth, analysis and ridicule)--is that fighting this fight with an unrelenting and ever more obsessive foe is enough to drive anybody crazy. We haven't figured out the appropriate balance of smacking them down and ignoring them entirely.
On a different but related manifestation of the rabid right's manipulation of an equally craven media, here's Steve Almond at Salon about the obsession with meaningless scandals, concluding that "scandalizing is the journalistic equivalent of spam."
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