Dear Jon,
I respectfully disagree with your monologue on the Giffords shooting. I think your response swings wide because of the viewpoint of your show.
Jon, your persona (the Daily Show's counterpart to the Colbert persona) is often accused of being a cynic. On the contrary I think the "Jon Stewart" character represents something innocent and idealistic - in a good way. He thinks politics really does work like we were all taught in 8th grade civics: informed citizens actively involved in democracy. A congress that passes bills through good-faith negotiation and civil debate. It's that idealism that lets him be genuinely disappointed and outraged that our politics are often more petty, corrupt, and stupid than Schoolhouse Rock made it seem. The JS character judges government and media by the measuring stick of his undimmed ideals. That motivates him to call out people like Jim Cramer, while a truly cynical "journalist" like Wolf Blitzer wouldn't even see a story there.
That outsider perspective has its blind spots however. One of them is when you create a false equivalence between liberals and conservatives. At your Rally To Restore Sanity you said the political conversation had been dominated by extremists on the left who think 9-11 was an inside job and extremists on the right who thought Obama was a socialist. And you urged "both sides" to "tone it down." As Bill Maher pointed out, there are no Democratic leaders who think 9-11 was an inside job. "But Republican leaders who think Obama's a socialist? All of them: McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin, all of them!"
The Tucson shooting represents the failure of the "both sides are bad, if only everyone were nicer" view of the R2RS.
The Tucson shooter was not a Tea Partier, but he was motivated by ideas that have been current within the paranoid far right for decades, like concern with world government and new currency.
The Tucson shooter represents the latest data point in a chain of killings.
1. David Adkisson, the murderer who shot up a Knoxville church in July 2008 because he believed "Democrats and the media" were ruining the country.
2. Richard Poplawski who killed 3 police officers in April 2009 because he believed Obama was going to take away his guns and Zionists controlled the government.
3. Scott Roeder, an anti-government and anti-abortion extremist, who killed abortion doctor George Tiller in May 2009.
4. Byron Williams, the felon who was caught in July 2010 on his way to shoot up the ACLU and the Tides Foundation (the latter had long been the subject of Glenn Beck's chalkboard conspiracy-theorizing). Williams said Beck had been "breaking open hideous corruption" and was like a "schoolteacher" to him.
Where is the left wing equivalent of these criminals?
Where is the left's Tea Party? Where are the signs: "We left our guns at home... this time"? "The tree of liberty must be renewed with the blood of tyrants"? Where are the leftists who brought rifles to rallies and political events?
Who is the left's Glenn Beck? Who broadcasts every day of the week with paranoid conspiracy theories that an elderly Eastern European Jew secretly controls the government and collaborated in the Holocaust? That the President secretly hates America and wants to hurt it? That symbolism and anagrams reveal his fascist or socialist leanings? That economic collapse and/or the actual End Times are around the corner? That FEMA is setting up concentration camps? That ACORN was set up to be Obama's Praetorian guard?
Where is the left's Sharron Angle, telling voters: "if this Congress keeps going the way it is people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around and Ill tell ya the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."
Where is the left's Sarah Palin? "Don't retreat, reload" and saying the government wants to set up "death panels"?
Where is the left's Dale Peterson, posing with and firing a shotgun during his campaign ad to be, of all things, an agricultural commissioner? Where is the left's Rick Barber, saying he would impeach Obama and having Thomas Jefferson tell the Tea Party to "gather your armies"?
Where is the left's Michele Bachmann saying she wants her constituents to be "armed and dangerous" and saying "we are going to have to fight back hard if we're not going to lose our country."
Where is the left's Joe Wilson or Jake Knotts, yelling at the President in Congress and calling him racial slurs?
Where is the left's Jesse Keeley, Gifford's Republican opponent who urged voters to come shoot M16s with him at a campaign event?
Jon, the three pillars of fascist behavior are submission, conventionalism, and aggression. When the leaders of the paranoid, far right spew their hatred and are not checked or silenced, then their rhetoric is conventionalized and legitimized. Suddenly, Glenn Beck is a mainstream point of view. It then takes only one crazy person like Byron Williams to submit to authority and actualize the fantasy of vengeful aggression that is implicit In Glenn's daily preaching ("they" hate "us," but "we" surround "them" - go get 'em!).
The Jon Stewart character (and perhaps you, the actual Jon Stewart) instinctively wants to rise "above it all," refrain from pointing fingers, chide all sides equally, and urge everyone to "tone it down."
Apart from the fact that the Left HAS nothing to tone down, why would the Right tone THEIR rhetoric down? Stirring up the angry and crazy elements in our politics has worked for them politically. Just as it was under Clinton, our Democratic President represents a meal ticket to a new generation of far-right pundits, and an election bonanza for a new crop of Republican Congressmen. Sarah Palin is your new Ann Coulter and Jim DeMint is your new Newt Gingrich.
The organized campaign of hatred and fear that the Tea Party represents has taken over the Republican Party.
Not only did you ignore the evidence linking the Tea Party to nascent political violence but you sought to absolve them.
Jon, as you said in 2005 about Katrina: "When people don't want to play the blame game, they're to blame."
