Jon Stewart is a remarkable satirist and parodist in the vein of Mark Twain, because Jon Stewart understands what Mark Twain knew, which is that the truth goes down more easily in a democracy when it’s marinated in humor.
They’re counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They’re counting on you to be standing at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket!
I believe democracy requires a ‘sacred contract’ between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.
What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma – the science of the heart…the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.
Democracy may not prove in the long run to be as efficient as other forms of government, but it has one saving grace: it allows us to know and say that it isn’t.
Lyndon Johnson believed the poor deserved a better life than the economy was providing them. He thought private power and greed had to be checked by a vibrant democracy.
He even jeopardized his pledge to preserve women’s rights under Roe v. Wade in order to get a health care bill written by the corporate lapdog Max Baucus and the gang of revolving door mercenaries he hired to write a bill friendly to industry.
The rich today are richer, there are more of them, they have round-the-clock propaganda factories in Rupert Murdoch’s empire and rightwing talk radio, and corporate media have their back.
Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths – half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.
Barack Obama treated too lightly the people and forces determined to destroy him. They spat in his face and didn’t even get ticketed for a misdemeanor.
