As I posted earlier today, Jon Stewart shredded Sean Hannity last night over his hypocritical adulation for Cliven Bundy, the lawbreaking rancher in Nevada who refuses to pay his grazing fees or move his cattle off federal land. Tonight, Hannity answered back. I think it’s best summed up by saying that Stewart must have struck a deep nerve. Hard.
In his takedown (video below), Stewart showed – via clips of Hannity, himself – that Hannity was a staunch believer in obeying the law when it suited him before he was against obeying the law when it suited him.
Rather than explain away the apparent hypocrisy, Hannity whined that Stewart used clips “dating back more than eight years.” Hannity also promised that he would do what Stewart and his writers “clearly are incapable of doing: that‘s telling the real story behind the Bundy family standoff with the federal government.”
Today, it was revealed that one of Bundy’s justifications for his lawlessness – his supposedly ancestral history at the ranch – doesn’t quite match the facts. Or to put it another way, Bundy seems to be a liar as well as a moocher. But that revelation was not included in Hannity’s “real story” in this or any other segment tonight.
In this segment, Hannity told the “real story” of his own comments about the Bundy standoff. But it was more or less the same whitewashed version he presented last night, while playing the victim of MSNBC criticism over his Bundy coverage. Hannity played clips of himself objecting to the “lack of proportionality” by the federal government.
What Hannity never played were clips of his deliberately provocative comments, in which he all but outright suggested that Bundy and his militia-type supporters start an armed conflict with the government.
Laughably, Hannity complained The Daily Show “just can’t give their viewers the facts. They have to spin the story.” Even more hiliariously, Hannity accused Stewart of being “kind of obsessed with this program” and said, “Remember he was begging me to stay in New York?”
Yes, I do remember. That was another devastating takedown of Hannity that could best be described as satire. But Hannity selectively edited The Daily Show video for his audience so as to remove most of the implicit criticism.
“What is Jon Stewart’s position here?” Hannity asked about the Bundy situation, as if Stewart were ducking an issue Hannity was courageously confronting. But Stewart makes his position very clear in the video below:
If you want to challenge the amount of federal land the government owns in the state of Nevada, fine. Make your case to the voters. If you want to challenge the concept of grazing fees, fine. But Hannity’s puffery and armed friends don’t make you a patriot.
Also, in typical Hannity fashion, he moved on to “defend” himself by smearing others. In this case, it was Stewart for not being tough enough on President Obama. Just pay no attention to all the times Stewart has come down hard on Obama.
But not in the way Hannity wants:
Did Jon Stewart ask Barack Obama about his friendship, his unapologetic domestic terrorist – let’s see: Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn?
Hannity also complained that Stewart’s 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity included Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam. Islam, Hannity said, “infamously is unapologetic for endorsing a fatwa, meaning ‘to kill,’ a novelist by the name of Salman Rushdie when he wrote the Satanic Verses.”
What Hannity didn’t say is that Stewart has said he regrets hosting Islam, was unaware of his endorsement of the Rushdie fatwa and said he would not have done it had he known. The fatwa was in 1989 and Islam has long since claimed he never meant it or at least has changed his stance. As for Ayers and Dohrn, they turned straight in 1980 and have been upstanding members of their community for decades. Long before President Obama, born in 1961, met them.
But while Hannity seems to think we should disregard what he said eight years ago – whether he has renounced his comments or not – he also seems to think we should act as though the explicitly renounced mistakes of others happened just yesterday. Even when they are decades old.
Of course, the term “negro” is not in and of itself racist. I don’t think there’s anyone saying that. The issue, like many things, is in the way that you use it, to cite Eric Clapton.
The way Harry Reid used the term in 2008 was indeed racist. He was referring to the way President Obama speaks, and it was absolutely inappropriate. Of course, Harry Reid also apologized for those remarks, publicly and privately, not only to President Obama but also to multiple civil rights leaders. They did not defend his remarks but accepted his apology and noted that he was doing the best job he could in the Senate to make a difference not only for African Americans but for all Americans in the face of the tremendous GOP intransigence that you have admirably condemned in your earlier posts. And as I stated before, I’m greatly appreciative of your condemnation of the GOP’s behavior in Congress. As you agreed, your situation could be a lot more improved were the GOP congresspeople to focus on doing their jobs rather than campaigning full time.
Now, if we look at the phrases used by both Cliven Bundy and Phil Robertson, we get into much nastier territory. Bundy wasn’t just using the word “negro”, as you of course know. He was saying that he believes that African Americans had more freedom living as slaves picking cotton than they do under current conditions. Robertson was saying about the same thing, although he didn’t use the same words. These are openly racist sentiments, connoting far more than an evaluation of someone’s speech patterns, and getting to the level of a white man like Bundy evaluating that a black man would be better off as a slave than as a free man with any public assistance. Which of course assumes that the black man automatically is living with public assistance, which is another racist sentiment. I also note that neither Bundy nor Robertson have apologized for their conduct. They have not acknowledged that there was anything wrong or hateful in their comments. (Robertson issued a strange statement that he was just following the Bible and that he loves everyone, but he did not address his specific comments in any way.) On the contrary, Harry Reid openly and publicly apologized for his conduct, and his apology was accepted. So if anyone should be taken to task, it seems logical that we should be thinking in the direction of Cliven Bundy and Phil Robertson, don’t you agree?
Cliven Bundy’s racist comments will probably get some attention today, although I’m betting that Fox News hopes that nobody noticed. By tomorrow, I expect they’ll be trying to defend Bundy’s comments as “free speech”, just like they did with Phil Robertson.
I also agree with you that Jon Stewart is a lot funnier than Sean Hannity. Although Hannity gets points for unintentional comedy – that stuff never gets old.
I don’t know much about all these odd right wing conspiracy theories about Harry Reid and the land or the supposedly murdered cattle. I do know that they all come from the same sources who regularly spout nonsense when these confrontations happen. As you know of course, the BLM tried to be polite in their dealings with Cliven Bundy for two decades. He openly refused to obey the law. After 20 years, they finally decided to make as public of an example as he was making of himself, so they began to openly deal with the situation of Bundy’s cattle. Not by killing them, although that’s what the far right would seem to believe, but by asserting the BLM’s right to manage this land.
I don’t think you have anything to worry about a SWAT team showing up at your door to collect unpaid taxes. But if you spend 20 years brazenly defying law enforcement and if you openly threaten weapons and violence against LE, and if your friends all show up with heavy weapons to back you up in your “struggle” against the law, you very well could meet with an unhappy LE response. In simple language, if you’re getting a speeding ticket, it’s generally considered a bad idea to brandish a gun at the ticketing officer. You might get shot. Just a thought…
If i was in charge, i would of simply knock on the door and your under arrest. Throw that bastard in jail and all this BS could of been avoided.
I’m glad i don’t owe the govt money, because i don’t want swat showing up, busting down my door and pointing assault style weapons at my wife and kids because of a bill, and then shoot my dog and cat before they leave.
Did you see all the cattle that the BLM killed and buried. That’s BS. I thought that kind of stuff happened in the movies.
Those actions are mafia tactics.
As for the strange statements about the Bureau of Land Management, I’ll assume that these are simply presented as a happy example of self-satire.
Just the thought of his idiot elderly audience’s chests swelling with pride and patriotism at the sight gives me the uncontrollable giggles.
The Fox producers are world-class immoral manipulators of their spectacularly gullible audience.
Many years ago, long before Fox News was born, I asked a fairly prominent national journalist if she’d ever known anybody she considered genuinely evil, was the word I used. She thought for about 3 seconds and said firmly, “Roger Ailes.”
I lost touch with her long ago, but I’d love to know what she thinks about this one evil person she’d ever known having control over an entire cable news network.
I think President Obama is doing the best he can with a completely recalcitrant GOP, just as he did during his first term. Kind of hard to get anything done when half of the people who should be working with you are openly trying to sabotage the whole process. In the end, history will view him as an embattled President from the moment he announced his candidacy, and one who accomplished a lot more than his opponents ever wished to acknowledge.
As for the ACA, I agree with you that it was watered down. This mostly happened when the Dems let go of the “public option”, which was the weak tea version of Single Payer – what we really need to fix the health care system. We’ll eventually get Single Payer in another ten years, as you know, but until then the ACA will serve as a Band-Aid. Along the way, the ACA will be amended just as Medicare was over the years, to address each complaint that comes up. But it’s not going to be repealed, and millions of Americans are already using its services. The GOP sadly will not be able to get rid of it, unless they wish to touch the third rail of US politics, and I think that privately, they know this. They just have to keep playing these games in public to keep the angrier people in their base happy. But I’m sure you already know this.
I agree that President Obama has indeed been stymied at every turn by the GOP. They’ve made clear since before he was inaugurated in 2009 that they had no intention of cooperating with him or even trying to work with him. Look what happened to Chris Christie when he asked for federal support during Sandy. Look what happened to John Boehner when he played golf with President Obama. The hardline right wingers want a complete blockade, and for the most part, they’ve been getting it. The result is exactly the problems you’re citing: Congress hasn’t actually accomplished anything since the GOP took the House, which has resulted in the lowest approval numbers I’ve ever seen for a Congress (12 or 13 percent, I believe). The GOP in Congress seem to have made it their mission to try to gum up the works – hence, no jobs plan, no constructive ideas, no nothing. Just a bunch of showboating by various people like Darrell Issa and Trey Goudy, and a record number of pointless votes to repeal the ACA. And a ridiculous pair of arguments about raising the debt ceiling and shutting down the government.
I agree with you that if the GOP in Congress would just do their jobs, as even Mike Huckabee begged them to do when Ted Cruz was throwing his temper tantrum last fall, your friends and yourself would be looking at a very different situation. I’m happy to know that you’ll join me in asking them to get back to work and actually do the right thing for their constituents before they do any further damage.
All these problems the administration is having is a total let down. I hoped that Obama would change things for the good. I seeing the opposite. My friends are totally getting screwed by aca. I have friends who don’t have jobs. Things don’t look good from where I’m standing. I feel like I have been left for dead.
Hannity is clearly very upset at Jon Stewart calling him on his behavior. The best part of the whole tantrum came today when he took another long segment on his radio show to insist how “I don’t care!” and to repeat how much he dislikes Stewart and anyone not as far over to the right as himself.
The reality is that Hannity’s behavior here is indeed hypocritical. He’s only supporting Bundy because this situation provides a ready-made apocalyptic confrontation between militia-types and law enforcement, and because frankly, Bundy is his kinda guy. Hannity should count himself lucky that his agitation here didn’t result in serious injury or worse.
Bundy’s supporters came openly armed and ready to open fire on federal officers. The fact that they were brandishing weapons and making such threats before anything had happened is what makes them domestic terrorists. Hannity seems to be confused on the timeline here as well. The whole thing starts with Bundy spending 20 years refusing to pay grazing fees and announcing increasingly troubling rhetoric to support his lawlessness. Once the BLM made clear they were finally going to enforce the situation, again after TWENTY YEARS of Bundy’s flaunting his refusal to obey the law, Bundy went ballistic and began making a pile of threats, including defending his property and cattle with weapons. Hannity and other Fox News folk seem to think the BLM should have just put a lien on Bundy’s property. We don’t know that this isn’t already in the works, so that’s a moot discussion. The point for the BLM was to publicly demonstrate that outright lawlessness cannot be allowed to go on for over two decades or we lose the cohesion of our society. Bundy figured he would just as publicly demonstrate his willingness to shoot federal officers, and his friends figured they’d jump on the bandwagon. Sadly for Bundy, he had no chance of winning such a confrontation. Sadly for Hannity and some of the Bundy supporters, it sounds like there was some eagerness to see a violent confrontation ensue. Hannity doesn’t get to walk that one back.
BTW Tom Berger, I actually agree with some of your points. Jon Stewart is quite open about the fact that he is NOT working as a journalist. When he appeared on on Fox News and castigated Chris Wallace, he made that point himself. Stewart’s show is a COMIC look at the day’s news. It is a skewering of whatever ridiculous situations have happened over the course of the news cycle. Stewart has gone after Republicans and Democrats over the years, although the GOP has frankly given him a lot more material.
Regarding the back and forth between left and right, I would agree that there are people on the left and right who are equally vehement about who they like or despise. But there’s a difference between blind blame and pointing out that the economic wreckage we’ve seen over the past few years stems right back into the George W. Bush presidency. The right wing would like everyone to forget that last part and just go after President Obama over the current economy (“Why isn’t it better YET?”), but they don’t get to press the RESET button that fast. The Dems regularly point out that Obama came in during the worst recession we’ve seen since the Great Depression, and it takes years to climb out of that kind of pit. Further, the GOP should be noted for regularly trying to gum up the works at any point the Dems tried to get anything done over the past 5 years. GOP Congressmen have held an astounding number of votes to repeal the ACA but we have yet to see anyone offer an actual alternative or anything looking like a Jobs Bill. GOP Governors have deliberately refused to do the Medicaid expansion that goes with the ACA, thus cutting off millions of people from healthcare. (This is also a way to set up the self-fulfilling prophecy that the ACA makes health care more expensive – something that would have been avoided had those governors followed the law and done the right thing by their constituents.) And both of those sets of actions are coordinated as an electoral strategy, under the vain hope that they can rile up their base and depress everyone else. It’s frankly a despicable strategy, and one can only hope the Dems won’t be cowed by it during this year or any other.
It’s also not “blame game” to point out that the right wing is constantly trying to manufacture illusory “scandals” about the Obama Administration as a way to create a false equivalency between the current ruses and the very real criminality demonstrated by Cheney, Rove, Libby, Gonzalez, etc.. It’s the same thing as the right wing constantly trying to say that the only event of the Bill Clinton presidency was the Lewinsky scandal. Riiiight. That was an eight year presidency, marked by a whole lot of events, including the internet boom, a stock market bubble and multiple major foreign affairs developments. Rush Limbaugh can whine all he wants about it, but America doesn’t remember Clinton as a failure, sorry.
As for W. Bush, his administration is going to be remembered mostly for his response to 9/11, but that will also include a series of controversies like two major wars that left us no safer and trillions of dollars farther in debt, an ill-advised tax refund that benefited the wealthy but didn’t really help anyone else while it also added trillions to our debt, a series of very troubling criminal actions undertaken by his staff and cabinet, a series of troubling associations between Bush and his staff with unsavory businesses like Enron and Haliburton, and of course the economic ruins in which he left the country. Fox News likes to crow anytime that Obama’s approval rating on their own polls dips to the low 40s. They forget that Bush’s rating was in the 20s when he finally left office in disgrace. It’s not “blame game” to remember that. It’s called understanding the lessons of history and not repeating them. The right wing may wish to invent false equivalencies and smoke screens to confuse the average reader, but sites like this one thankfully point out the reality.
C’mon Richard, don’t mock Slanthead. It’s a rare occasion when someone born with an undersized cranium can learn to pronounce a new word with 4 or more syllables!
And you know what? RW media, to try making up a double standard that doesn’t exist. “Well, NBC went on and on about Bush’s drones, silence about Obama…” NBC broke the story, but that fact got in their way. If there was a Bush precendent to it, he was brought up to give that whine. That’s. About. It.
Also, like Antoinette said- Bundy’s supporters came packing and ready. They were talking about how they were gonna shoot themselves some cops, some of them are even well-documented keeping their guns trained on them. Not only that, but just about every story about how they’re so picked on turned out to be bunk. Some of them cross the line and get arrested, they make signs that say “1st amendment area” and plaster up pictures. They use their wives and children as human shields, post up that the feds were attacking their wives and children.
Bundy is running the mother of all self-fulfilling prophecies, and plastering up his selective memory every time he gets a step closer to his goal of having a Ruby Ridge type outcome. If the feds were half of what he claimed, him and his supporters would be either dead, or in the ICU from an Occupy rally grade beating. Officers like what he wants you to believe they are don’t fuck around- They say they’re gonna do it, and it gets done in the time it takes them to arrive. If anything, Bundy’s being coddled because the response he deserves plays into the crap he’s fed the teahadists.
Your put down today on those who criticize you won’t work. We will continue to call you out on your typical lies, you old narcissist hack. You should be more concerned about your declining ratings and affiliates. The only thing you were good at was construction.
Put yourself in law enforcement agents shoes. If you were sent to a place, and knew that the people were armed would you go unarmed? Law enforcement are not mind readers. They don’t know how these people would react. There could be someone in the crowd who may start shooting. These people’s mindset are already off the charts.
Yes, Tom. We agree 100% that the feds should arrest Bundy and throw him in jail. The problem is Hannocchio and the rest of the Fox “News” clowns will use that against the government, and continue to flame the fans of anti-government rhetoric. Those same angered supporters of Bundy may march down to the jail-armed with rifles-and demand his release.
Hannocchio and Fox “News” producers started this mess. They own it. They made a mountain out of a molehill, strictly for ratings purposes. If any life is loss because of these amateur clowns we hope Hannocchio and the producers of this loser network are charged and prosecuted for sedition.
Hannocchio’s ratings are declining. He’s desperately trying everything in the book to increase it. His 25-54 demos are even worse. Notice his recent segments on Spring Break and Pot Smoking, and the music for his intro and out. That’s an attempt to increase the 25-54 demos. A majority of his viewers are older females and males which does not sit well with ad agencies. Check out his Facebook page and see for yourself.
If he continues to decline in those demos the suits will have no choice but to replace him with a younger host in his current time slot. In our humble opinion, Hannocchio is at the age where he can’t attract younger viewers anymore. We would let his contract expire, or put him on the weekends.
“’Cuse me while I whip this out!
Sean and his audience would fit in perfectly as the residents of Rock Ridge in the movie Blazing Saddles."
ROTFLMAO!
Dear doors17: Forgive me for saying this: I know this may sound like excessive flattery in your book, but in the immortal words of “Sheriff Bart” (played by the late Cleavon Little) that were spoken after he fooled and escaped from the simple minded residents of Rock Ridge:
“Oh baby, you are so talented……and they are SO DUMB!”
:^)
I wonder where Hannity is on the proportionality of using SWAT teams to bust pot smokers and suspending kids from school who get into fights. Our society has lost proportionality in many ways due to high profile instances of violence. But if we are to avoid chaos, the gov. can’t ignore scofflaws like Bundy. Putting a wimpy lien on his property is not going to get the man to pay his fees.
Sean and his audience would fit in perfectly as the residents of Rock Ridge in the movie Blazing Saddles. (my sincere apologies to Mel Brooks)
Is that a ten-gallon hat, or are you just enjoying the show?
I’m paid a king’s ransom to say what I say, even if I don’t know just what the Hell it is I’m sayin’!