02/09/10 Stockholm, Sweden – First, the politicians appeared on the comedy shows… and now the comedians and talking heads can themselves represent the political debate. The laugh-ability of politics is almost getting too serious, or the other way around? At least it’s often funny, like this memorable moment:
Jon Stewart: Once you allow in a vacuum of power, what will assume power in Washington are special interests and lobbyists. So, if you allow too much nitpicking on the edges of legislation by lobbyists, it will necessarily turn into a type of lobbyist gruel.
It’s mostly political bantering like the above, but at about minute 21:55 it gets into the banking bailout and whether or not President Obama, and the country, is now socialist. The discussion even ranges as widely as touch upon Dr. Ron Paul, the costs of war, and the Tea Party movement.
This clip came to our attention via Posterous. The unedited video of Jon Stewart interviewed on The O’Reilly Factor is below.
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of Agora Financial International, where he advances the growth of Agora Financial publishing enterprises outside of the US. Previously, he was publisher of The Daily Reckoning, and founding publisher of both UrbanTurf and RFID Update -- which he ran from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico -- as well as associate publisher of FierceFinance. Rocky has an honors MS from the Stockholm School of Economics and an honors BA from Harvard University, where he served on the board of directors for Let’s Go Publications, Harvard Student Agencies, and The Harvard Advocate.
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We had 8 yrs of a Repug Stalinist personality cult of the great leader and now we have the Dim version. So what/what else is new? How else do you explain Stewart’s hemming and hawing in the opening when O’Really (sic) points out how much the Dim admin is spending/Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iran/Yemen. (OK, Bill didn’t bring all that up if I remember correctly, because the Repugs are into warfare as opposed to the Dim forte and penchant for welfare.)
(Neither do I have to much use for Bill. He is considerably- and hypocritically – more polite to Stewart than he is to others – Ron Paul, for e.g. – because not only does Stewart have his own show to come back on, but Stewart can probably make mincemeat of him since for one he can laugh at himself. Bill can’t until he gets past his own oily smugness.)
As for “socialism” check out Tom Rose’s definition, late of Grove City College.
Fascism is the college level version of govt. control, regulation and collusion with big business; communism is the high school level with outright govt. ownership of business and the market.
That means we haven’t had a free market since the New Deal, if not the institution of the cartel/monopoly of the Fed.Reserve which price fixes the interest rate.(Yippee!) But we have had fascism. Now not only is that more overt, Obam nationalized Detroit. The Repugs are upset – not in principle, mind you – but at the brazen speed of it all.
In other words, both parties are merely wings of the More Big Govt. Party and both are at least fascist, if not more. But the pot can hardly call the kettle a trotskite, which is what the neocon right wants to call the progressive left.
Right now the Tea Party is working through this paradigm with the libertarians vs. the neocon Right fighting it out. If it doesn’t get straightened out, all we are due for is more of the same from the Repugs who replace the Dims. Scott Brown after all, voted for Romneycare and Eva Pretty Palin is but the conservative Affirm. Action feminist big govt. narcissist alternate to the progressive big. govt. narcissist BH Obam. Yippee again.