Tuesday, August 14, 2007

John Gibson is a dick even by Fox News' standards

I don't know how many of you out there were watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart six years ago, but if you were, you probably remember his first show after 9/11. It was a memorable one, and showed why in only a few years some of us would come to think of him as a national treasure.

I think I could probably find video of it somewhere, but the point I want to make is that what he said was memorable, so most of these quotes are from memory.

He had no interest in mocking the President that night, nor I believe did 99% of the country, including me. What he did show interest in was connecting with his audience.

I remember him addressing the camera as he often does, usually to hilarious effect. But that night he said all he wanted to ask his viewers was..."How you doing? You OK?"

Speaking softly, and evidently from his heart, he talked about how George W's habit of mispronouncing words (or just making up his own) just didn't seem funny anymore. He hoped it would be again one day, because that would mean that maybe things were back to normal.

In other words, or at least as I read it, if that was the biggest pie a satirist could throw, then Bush would have done pretty good.

Well, now it's six years later.

None of you reading this need me to enumerate all the things George W. Bush has done to make himself a deserving target of satire and mockery at the very least. Both from professionals like Stewart and those who make snarky comments on the internet.

But that night, Stewart also said this.

And this next bit is not from memory, it's his actual quoted remarks:
The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center. And now it's gone. And they attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce, and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can't beat that.


Now. What kind of a truthful, wise and loving human being could find anything worthy of ridicule in a statement like that? Who would express his contempt for a man's thoughts and ideas at a time like that and, more, be willing to accuse that man of insincerity?

Ladies and gentlemen, John Gibson of Fox News.

2 comments:

Richard said...

I was just about to make a post about this on my own blog, but I'll say here what I would have said there:

It's not so much that I'm surprised, but that I'm surprised at myself for being surprised.

After everything else we've seen from them, somehow I still thought there was a line of bare minimum human decency even a Fox News guy wouldn't cross. How could I have been so foolish? What Gibson displays isn't only contempt for a human being expressing sincere emotion in a moment of crisis: it's contempt for humanity itself. He actively wishes for the death of thousands merely so that some voters will change their political choice. To this end, he supports and cheers on terrorists and callously mocks someone who's horrified by and mourns a senseless loss of life. Gibson's soul, if he had one, would be tiny and deformed.

Ben Varkentine said...

"Gibson's soul, if he had one, would be tiny and deformed."

His soul's not the only thing.