Comedian Sarah Silverman didn’t start out as a politically charged stand-up. But lately she seems eager to shift her shtick from the pretty girl who talks dirty to the comedian eager to carry water for the erroneous Left.

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Silverman recently appeared on MSNBC’s ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ to promote ‘Live from [N-Word]head,’ a comedy show meant to mock Texas Gov. Rick Perry for his scandalous ranch connection. Too bad nobody told Silverman the charge has already been debunked and is simply part of the mainstream media’s attempt to discredit yet another Republican.

Here’s Silverman pontificating on the importance of keeping the racist meme alive:

“I think that any time racism shows itself in a tangible way, it’s not just a gas in the air, it’s important to take the opportunity to point at it,” Silverman said. “You know? I think it’s dangerous when it just kind of goes away and, you know, here’s a guy who is a governor and running for president and it has not injured him in any way really.”

But the real culprit for letting the faux racist charge die is … wait for it … the media, according to Silverman.

“I partially blame the media actually,” Silverman said. “I mean, Rachel, I am not – I have no religion, but am I crazy – I miss – I kind of miss – I miss the Jew-run banks and media. I think that wouldn’t have been let go so fast.”

You’ve been served, Garofalo.

So we have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn’t the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets — such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks — often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows — such as The O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show — actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.

Meanwhile, the other set of knowledge surveys, from worldpublicopinion.org, offer mixed support for Stewart. The 2003 survey strikes us as pretty solid, but the 2010 survey has been critiqued for its methodology.

The way Stewart phrased the comment, it’s not enough to show a sliver of evidence that Fox News’ audience is ill-informed. The evidence needs to support the view that the data shows they are “consistently” misinformed — a term he used not once but three times. It’s simply not true that “every poll” shows that result. So we rate his claim False.

Stewart’s response…

In short: “Yes, I lied, but look at how much Fox lies!”

The response is significant in two ways; first, Stewart’s subtly shifting the goalposts to cover the black eye this has given him. Minus a shred of context (such as “Who said these things on which program?” or “what are the criteria by which Politifact deems this a lie?” or “how frequently is Fox caught in a false statement that it doesn’t correct compared to other news networks?”), Stewart has quietly changed the conversation. Since he wasn’t in his element (constant brown-nosing) on Sunday, he slipped up and made a claim that could be refuted by statistics, so last night, given time to plan and after much ego massaging by his staff, Stewart could make safe, anecdotal charges against FNC as if they prove the same point as the lie he spat at Chris Wallace.

Second, his deflection reinforces the impressions we got from his recent incident with Steven Crowder:

1. Stewart is a coward. For those who aren’t aware of what I’m referring to, one of Stewart’s producers emailed Steven Crowder’s manager and literally said “we never book conservative pundits.” When Crowder made the message public, Stewart freaked out, and his producer intimidated Crowder’s manager until he severed ties with our fellow blogger for fear of being blacklisted. This wasn’t a move to save face; there was no more information to suppress; this was pure bullying. Crowder embarrassed Stewart, so Stewart tried to destroy an up-and-coming comic’s career.

To clarify his producer’s email remarks, he has conservative *pundits* on the show– suit-and-tie WASPs, dry political types who he knows will be on defense the whole time. He gets to own the debate by being the sole possessor of the Comedy card. If he dared to have a conservative comedian like Greg Gutfeld or Crowder, he might have someone who pushes back against him and beats him at his own game. He can’t let conservatives be funny in front of his audience; why, they might start believing crazy things, like conservatives can be funny! We see it in his recent interviews and debates with Bill O’Reilly; in an environment that Stewart can’t control, the Fox host gets to break this unspoken rule, taking witty, deadpan jabs at Stewart, himself, and the television culture in which they operate, much to the visible discontent of the Most Trusted Man in America. And that brings us right to our next point:

2. Stewart is incredibly thin-skinned. Any time someone goes on offense against him, Jon gets beyond indignant. We see it most clearly on his Sunday appearance; he’s practically snarling at Chris Wallace. Why? Because Wallace doesn’t treat him as the wizened statesman/hip cat persona the rest of the MSM has built up for him; Wallace treats him like this guy. Instead of going, “Oh, garsh, I guess my entire existence really is based around an organization designed solely for malevolent propaganda, and you’ve convinced me to do some soul-searching!”, Wallace challenges him to admit Fox is no worse than outlets like the New York Times. With the grace and poise of a college freshman, Stewart barks back his “consistently… every poll” nonsense. Because Wallace doesn’t automatically acknowledge him as the smartest guy in the room, he commits an unforced error, revealing that his hatred of Fox is an a priori prejudice, not an evidenced conclusion. And now he’s doing his best to tap dance around it with a number of anecdotes drawn from a multi-year period– a number we could match from a week’s worth of content from any other cable news network.

3. Stewart’s downfall will be his insistence that he’s not on the playing field. If we take just a smattering of the issues Stewart has covered in the past couple years– reasons for the Iraq war, waterboarding, 9/11 first responders, Stewart has gone full-on editorializing pundit multiple times, shoehorning the occasional sardonic joke into angry rants and gotcha-grasping interviews that would make Charlie Gibson vomit. Even progressive pundits see through it; he’s the only one with blinders big enough to deny the obvious. In an interview as fascinating as it is uncomfortable, Rachel Maddow spends 50 minutes trying to get him to admit that his schtick, on which she has shamelessly modeled her own schtick, is actually comparable to her schtick. Yet, by leveraging her undying admiration, Stewart pushes Maddow away again and again, going so far as to say outright, “we have no responsibility.”

He’s desperately trying to hold together the fantasy that his work exists in a vacuum devoid of any cultural significance– that whatever happens on his show stays on his show since he’s only on the sidelines– but the fantasy is falling apart faster than ever in the wake of this Fox interview; If he keeps it up much longer, he’s going to become the joke, like David Letterman has become to us (if you’re a Stewart fan, just switch out Letterman with Leno so you can understand that). And based on his response to the Politifact article about his Fox claim, we may look back at this whole affair as the moment that Jon Stewart officially jumped the shark.

Cross-posted at the Landmark Report.

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Rachel Maddow’s closing remarks in this segment are nothing short of obscene:

“We asked [Huckabee's production company] today who had done the animation on these DVDs.  They would not tell us.  If you know who brought this amazing animated sauce to life, please get in touch with us.  We would like to know.”

Maddow might couch her unholy request in that chirpy, kindergarten teacher voice, but the venom is 100% pure.  The hypocrisy, however, is 150%.

Read the quote again closely. Maddow already knows the name of the production company, but right after decrying the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s, she demands the production company — wait for it, wait for it — name names. And because they refuse to name names, Maddow then weaponizes her own audience to witchunt up those names on her behalf.

Why?

For the same reason there was a blacklist in the 1950s. No one did anything illegal or improper here, Maddow simply disagrees with the politics of the art and in the hopes of toxifying and/or putting a stop to it has apparently decided to make a MSNBC show trial out of dunking the creators in water to see if they can acquit themselves by drowning.

Our friends at NewsBusters sum this up well:

In notoriously liberal Hollywood, being outed as Mike Huckabee’s animator could have bad career consequences.  Ironic, no, that Maddow was enlisting her viewers in such an outing just seconds after decrying the way people exposed during the McCarthy hearings “never worked again.”

A reader also helped NewsBusters bust the MSNBC Rhode Scholar on her revisionist history:

“[H]er history is BUNK. McCarthy had nothing to do with the Hollywood hearings.  That was HUAC. Maddow went on and on about McCarthy calling Hollywood actors to testify.  Great hearings, but McCarthy had nothing whatsoever to do with them.  He was interested in commies working for the government.”

Mark my words, this is all intentional. Governor Huckabee is using the power of art to reach children and no one understands that power better than the Left. And they want this turf all to themselves. Maddow is intentionally sending a message to the artistic community that if you step off the Liberal Plantation I will Alinsky you — I will personalize this, target you, and make you infamous to any number of future employers. 

And in response our corrupt MSM goes, doo-de-do-de-do-doo-do-do…  Because they agree with Maddow and her vicious tactics.

NewsBusters has more.

How stupid do you have to be to not see 9/11 as an act of war? Willfully and intentionally stupid. And who in their right mind makes the fate of monsters a high enough priority to make an issue out of it, a crusade?

No compassion for the victims’ families who would only be victimized again by the media circus surrounding any kind of criminal trial and no respect for the rules of war or the integrity of our military to honorably conduct these trials. Personally, I’m relieved we still live in a  country where if a president wants to get re-elected he had better keep Gitmo open and hold tribunals. If it ever goes the other way, we are lost.

Rachel Maddow is not much happier than Michael Moore, but she does at least expose Obama’s cynical politics behind the move.

Ooooooh, if Sarah Palin talked like this can you imagine Rachel Maddow’s sanctimonious report the next day? I’ll bet Rachel would find that report so important she’d wear her smart-girl glasses. 

If you’ve have never seen Michael Moore absolutely unhinged and furious (or whip out a pair of handcuffs) before, click the link. He’s ENGRAGED, calling for mass strikes, and encouraging students — YOUR children — to walk out of class tomorrow.

Union buster Michael Moore is so angry I wish I knew where he was so I could track him down and keep saying, Is the widdle girl gonna cry? until he did.

The lies Moore and Maddow tell here are breathtaking, audacious, and most of all desperate. There are also too many to list. But the handcuffs are my favorite part. Let me just say that when Moore whips ‘em out you’re not exactly thinking Baretta here. It’s such a pathetic piece of populist performance art, you kinda feel sorry for him. He’s helpless and feckless and distraught. he’s also pouting. And as well he should be. The Institutional Left had a pretty bad day today, and now that I have ashes on my forehead and the spirit of Jesus Christ’s love in my heart, I’m going to start doubling down on my small role in that righteous cause.

God bless the Tea Party for ruining Michael Moore’s day.

God bless these brave Governors and their legislatures for doing the same.

DOWN with the public union privileged class aristocracy funded through government enforced taxation of the working class.

DOWN with hypocritical, multi-millionaire filmmakers who meddle and manipulate and wear baseball caps.

Power to the People!

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Rachel had to run with it.

And boy did she enjoy it. A little too much, perhaps.

Too bad it ain’t real.

See, Christwire is a parody site – all the stuff is made up.

Still, she fell for it like a tourist pawing at a fake Rolex.

But that’s no big deal. It happens. We get stuff like this pitched all the time and we’ve almost been taken. And, I’m still convinced Fred Phelps is a left-wing performance artist. A damn good one, I might add.

Anyway, Maddow let her lazy assumptions about the right get the better of her. Dripping with disdain for Palin and conservatives in general – she can’t see the difference between what’s real and what’s phony.

But that’s not what got me.

It was her rabid delivery. It creeped me out.

Look – both the right and left are easy to parody. The only difference: the left is coddled by the media, because the media is the left. It’s why nobody made fun of Obama. They are Obama.

And this makes their parody-detection muscles flabby. Comfortably cocooned in a shell of never questioned beliefs, asking them to detect political parody is like asking Michael Moore to run up ten flights of stairs.

The good news: RM admitted she fell for the joke.

Too bad she was the punchline.

And if you disagree with me, you’re worse than Hitler.

(That’s a joke – Rachel – it’s not really meant to mean you’re worse than Hitler)

Tonight:

Brooke Goldstein

John DeVore

Newcomer Karl Zahn (comedian!)

Looking at things on paper, it appeared it wouldn’t be long before Hannity would be forced to come begging and pleading for a menial position on Morgan’s staff.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the actual squaring off of Morgan’s show with Hannity’s: namely, Morgan’s guest lineup betrayed the fact that he believes the American people want to spend another hour of their night watching Hollywood elites get tossed softball questions by a host who’s consumed with reminding us he came here from across the pond.

In other words, to date, Morgan’s plan to beat Hannity includes interviews with Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, and Kim Kardashian, among others. When we consider the fact that Hannity’s offerings have included salt-of-the-earth folks like Sarah Palin and down to earth commentary from the ever-present “Great American Panel,” it’s little wonder that Morgan is getting shellacked in the ratings. (Yes, Morgan is beating MSBNC’s Rachel Maddow, but that’s no feat.)

The lesson here is the same one that Hollywood elites refuse to learn from plummeting box office ticket sales and which politicians from the ruling class are still denying in the wake of the November 2, 2010 midterm elections: the American people are as sick and tired of seeing elitists and pontificators on the big screen as they are with having them in legislative offices (and this carries over to the television we watch).

Thus, while Morgan’s fourth show drew roughly 1.03 million viewers, Hannity’s continued to draw about twice that number.

Tellingly, Morgan recently sought to steady his floundering ratings by interviewing none other than Howard Stern. I don’t know if they talked about the demented topics that usually please Stern’s fans on satellite radio, but one thing’s for certain: Morgan made a one time trade of elites for a train-wreck in hopes that the old adage is true and people wouldn’t be able to turn away.

Long story short: it didn’t work. Hannity’s substance and America-first approach to life and his art are demolishing Morgan’s pretense and esotericism as soundly as conservatives trounced liberals on November 2, 2010.

It’s no secret that I’ve never been a fan of Moore’s, but I’ve often said that the last thing I’d call the man is “stupid.” Afterall, a man who cons Americans into paying $9.99 at the local Cineplex only to watch him sermonize on the evils of capitalism must be one of rapier wit. One would think that either he’s a clever graduate from the school of Andy Kaufman, or he’s the embodiment of pure evil held back a grade from the kindergarten of Michael Meyers.

As it seems now, he’s neither of those.  It’s becoming more and more glaringly apparent that the man is dumb. Pure and simple. In a recent interview with MSNBC’s Richard Maddow, Michael Moore stated that people own guns because they are racist. He prefaced his comments with this:

“Everybody’s packing there… everybody has guns. Yet they all said that we have a very low gun murder rate here in Tuscon.  So why do you have a gun then?”

Ummm… How about, so that the gun murder rate remains low?

I’d never pictured Michael Moore as being so dense that he could answer his own question without tasting the irony. Gelatinous yes, but dense a good filmmaker does not make.

High gun ownership in this case, would seem to be the cause for low-gun murder rates, not the effect.  Criminals have told us time and time again, they’re worst fear is that the person they’re mugging or the one who’s house their breaking into may be armed.

• Fact: Bad guys hurt people.
• Another Fact: Bad guys don’t like being shot.

The More You Know!

Rather than see the absurdity in answering his own question, Michael Moore went on to explain that the only reason Americans own guns is due to their racist fear of black people breaking into their homes:

“That imaginary person that’s going to break into your home…and kill you. Who does that man look like? You know, it’s not freckle-faced Jimmy down the street is it?”

Well thank you for educating us, Mr. Moore. I only have one question; What about the black people in the United States whom also own guns?  Are they racists, merely afraid of the not freckled-face folk, too? Or is it that they’re only afraid of white people breaking into their homes? What about Latinos/Latinas? Or am I supposed to believe that they stick with mere cutlery?

Of course, Michael Moore and Maddow then went on to cite the fallacy that a gun owner is more likely to be disarmed and have their gun used against them in a self-defense situation.  No facts or logic need apply. They sort of hop-scotched the actual research in order to get to the part where they call all of the middle-American gun-owners nothing more than racists.

Let me be the first to say, that I own a gun.  I’ve never thought myself to be a racist but maybe today, Maddow and Moore have proven me wrong. Perhaps they’ve proven us all wrong. 

What say you, other gun owners out there? Do you own guns simply because you’re filthy racists? 

Moore and Maddow are betting you do…

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Dear Michael Moore, just a friendly heads up that the same Martin Luther King you’re quoting to make your nonsensical anti-gun argument, is the same Martin Luther King who — wait for it, wait for it — owned guns!

UCLA Law Professor Adam Winkler, via Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:

King applied for a concealed carry permit in Alabama. The local police had discretion to determine who was a suitable person to carry firearms. King, a clergyman whose life was threatened daily, surely met the requirements of the law, but he was rejected nevertheless. At the time, the police used any wiggle room in the law to discriminate against African Americans.

Glenn Reynolds closes with this: Give the authorities discretion, and it will be abused.

Remember everyone, there are only certain parts of the Bill of Rights the Left is in favor of. They can shove Freedom of Speech all the way over to allowing the New York Times to print national security leaks while we’re at war and find the right to abortion in a non-existent right to privacy, but this whole Right to Bear Arms thing remains fuzzy and therefore negotiable.

Jim Treacher destroys the rest of Moore’s argument here.

Maybe Stewart isn’t being dishonest. Maybe the left-wing comedian honestly doesn’t see himself for what he is — a political warrior for the Left disguised as a lofty satirist. Does the “Daily Show’ host not possess enough self-awareness to understand that when you have to run around doing rehabilitation interviews that maybe it’s not everyone else who’s got it wrong?

‘Restore Sanity” was a bridge too far and damaged Stewart’s brand. HE became the story and whether by design or due to a crippling inability to turn anything resembling a penetrating insight onto himself, the disingenuous posturing finally caught up to him. Blame it on a raging case of Beck-Envy.

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