Salon.com > Will Bunch

No, Jon Stewart, you’re not just a comedian

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 19:22:00 +0000

This originally appeared at Attytood, Will Bunch's blog at Philly.com

TV funnyman (I love that phrase) Jon Stewart is back in the news again, as he so frequently seems to be. For reasons I don't fully understand, Chris Wallace thought it would be a good idea to invite the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" on his program, "Fox News Sunday," and Stewart agreed to come on. Of course, Stewart showed his gratitude by telling Wallace that he was "insane" and saying that FNC is disproportionately responsible for poisoning the discourse in this country.

Stewart called Fox News a "relentless agenda-driven 24-hour news opinion propaganda delivery system" -- that sounds about right. But then he added this:

"Here's the difference between you and I. I'm a comedian first. My comedy is informed by an ideological background, there's no question about that. But the thing that you will never understand ... is that Hollywood, yeah, they're liberal, but that's not their primary motivating force. I'm not an activist. I am a comedian."

The right-wing congressman made for the Obama age

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:01:00 +0000

On Oct. 17, 2009, there was a black-tie gala dinner at a luxury hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, where guests dined on balsamic-laced flank steak and mango coulis. After dessert was served, the mostly men in black ties and dinner jackets, and a few women in their Saturday-night best, in the ballroom leaned back in their seats to hear the night's main event -- a speech by a member of the United States Congress. Nothing remarkable about that ... in theory.

Except that the gala was held to celebrate the notorious, conspiracy-minded right-wing political group the John Birch Society, the band of Commie hunters made famous in the early 1960s, who’d seemingly vanished, only to burst back onto into the newly mainstreamed paranoid fringe within months after the election of Barack Obama as president. Rather than back away from its divisive views -- most notably that popular U.S. president and World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower was somehow an agent of international Communism -- the Birchers were doubling down in the age of Obama, still maintaining that a planet-wide conspiracy hatched some 200 years ago by the ultra-secret Illuminati in search of a so-called "New World Order" continues to flourish today.

Hosie Miller: Shirley Sherrod’s dad, and a casualty in a forgotten war

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:45:00 +0000

This original appeared at Attywood, Will Bunch's blog

For all the over-warped speed in initially getting that bogus version of the Shirley Sherrod story out there and pushing her our the door at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, other details in this story have been surprisingly slow to emerge. In particular, I'd been waiting to hear more about a comment from Sherrod on CNN that her father had been murdered by a white farmer in 1965.

Now we know a few details. Her dad was named Hosie Miller, and he was a deacon at Thankful Baptist Church in Newton, Ga., toward the southwest corner of the state. He was also a farmer who, according to CNN, grew corn, peanuts, cotton and cucumbers and raised hogs, cows and goats. Forty-five years ago, Hosie Miller was shot to death -- in the back, no less -- by a white farmer in what his daughter now describes as ostensibly a dispute over a few cows, although the exact circumstances were murky.

How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:28:00 +0000

The myth of Ronald Reagan was already looming in the spring of 1997 — when a highly popular President Bill Clinton was launching his second-term, pre-Monica Lewinsky, and the Republican brand seemed at low ebb. But what neoconservative activist Grover Norquist and his allies proposed that spring was virtually unheard of — an active, mapped-out, audacious campaign to spread a distorted vision of Reagan's legacy across America.

In a sense, some of the credit for triggering this may belong to those supposedly liberal editors at the New York Times, and their decision at the end of 1996 to publish that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. survey of the presidents. The below-average rating by the historians for Reagan, coming right on the heels of Clintons’ easy reelection victory, was a wake-up call for these people who came to Washington in the 1980s as the shock troops of a revolution and now saw everything slipping away. The first Reagan salvos came from the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank that also had feted the 10th anniversary of the Reagan tax cut in 1991. After its initial article slamming the Times, the foundation’s magazine, Policy Review, came back in July 1997 with a second piece for its 20th anniversary issue: “Reagan Betrayed: Are Conservatives Fumbling His Legacy?”