Free The Joy of Hate by Greg Gutfeld

liberal tilt?
    Short answer: No.
    Long answer: Nooooooooooo.
    The evidence for this is pretty simple: there would have been no rally at all, if the Dems were doing great. There would have been no rally if no one raised a hackle (whatever that is) about health care reform. Stewart was responding to hostility to the Obama administration. The anger, to Stewart, seemed disproportionate to the actual cause. And he could be right—except that he’s never done it before.
    Which makes the joke wear thin, at least to me. Think about it: What Stewart is doing is not speaking truth to power but poking fun at the people who are speaking truth to power. I mean, Stewart isn’t going after politicians, he’s mocking people who are. While the Tea Party is a bottom-up phenomenon, Stewart is actually on the very, very top looking down. His rally was a reaction from the establishment, not against it. He’s saying, “Come on, man—we got a cool president. You people are raging dorks. Why are you rocking the boat? You’re not the ones who get to do that—we are! You aren’t the ones we were waiting for!”
    Here’s more proof: Leading up to Stewart’s event, Democrats actually complained that the rally might hurt their chances in the midterm elections. They worried that their supporters would be more inclined to focus on the rally before the election rather than campaign or vote. The rally would, in effect, replace the electionin that feel-good exercise called “doing your part.” It would be like eating dessert before dinner.
    And maybe the Dems were right. They got trounced. But I’m pretty sure those results had to do more with anger toward the administration and less with Stewart’s goofing around with his celebrity pals on the political stage. In the end: no one cared. A bunch of libs got to have their “cool kid” status confirmed, Stewart boosted his ratings for a few days, and Colbert trotted out his talking-like-a-republican-is-a-parody-in-itself schtick. I guess to some it never gets old. And even I admit it makes me giggle.
    But this is what passes for rebellion in media, which is really just making fun of people in fanny packs who prefer Sarah Palin over Sarah Silverman. That’s the line that’s drawn, and it’s one I cross all the time. I think Palin is delightfully quirky and Silverman viciously funny. I also sympathize with Palin’s constant humiliations by the tolerant cool set (I can’t think of a single public figure other than Palin whose disabled child is such a gleeful object of derision), and see Silverman resort too many times to lazy PC humor in order to get a drive-by laugh from a pliant audience. I find both women invigorating, but it’s clear one is more a victim of intolerance than the other. And someone needs to tell Silverman that her fascination with her bodily functions isn’t mirrored in the public at large (exception: the fat dude at tech support. I wish he’d stop telling me about it).
    So that rally was not for me. The bottom line of its existence: “We’re cool, they’re crazy.” In other words, we pretend to be tolerant, but everyone who disagrees with us is a crazy racist in a tricorn hat. The true irony: In an event where the goal was to celebrate getting along and peachy-keen tolerance, they invited Yusuf Islam, previously known as Cat Stevens, to sing. A beaconof intolerance, he encouraged the assassination of Salman Rushdie over his tome
The Satanic Verses
, which he found to be critical of Islam. He is about as peaceful as the guy who hangs out on the corner of my street shouting at lampposts. But he’s been around long enough, and he used to be Cat Stevens so he’s cool. He’s one of them! A violent extremist—but fun nonetheless! He plays acoustic guitar! How cool is it to have the guy who sang that song you used to make out to in the dorms back in the eighties! And how lucky we are to have prolonged our college years indefinitely!
    The media, however, was having too