The Cold Civil War

Last night I watched the unedited interview with Jon Stewart on the O'Reilly Factor. It was a riveting and eye-opening look into the media circus and the great divide between the right and the left. I recommend watching the whole thing here. That same day I listened to a Fresh Air interview with John Oliver from the Daily Show. He also provided a great insight into the current tea party movement.

Both interviews solidified my notion that we are under a cold civil war in our country. It used to be that democrat and republican citizens could actually live and work side-by-side and have healthy arguments about their differences and come out of it unchanged but affable. That doesn't seem to be possible any more.

As both interviewees have illustrated, the tea party movement--the grassroots GOP gatherings--are a formidable force that's sweeping the heartland. These are angry, determined men and women who are hell-bent on steering the country more to the right, mostly by venting their anguish over what they consider a tyrannical president. These everyday Joes and Janes have a lot of venom in their movement. All the while, Fox News gives an illusion of washing their hands of it all, yet at the same time fanning their flames. "Obama is a muslim." "He's a socialist." "He's a tyrant." It's almost as though the tea partiers themselves don't know what they're talking about, but they need to spout out bad-sounding epithets to quicken their blood and the blood of those around them. And Fox has the cameras well-focused on it all.

And the differences between Stewart and O'Reilly confirm my rationale of being a democrat. Stewart is a comedian whose passion is politics, and O'Reilly is an political opinionist whose passion seems to be bullying. Stewart was his usual self-effacing funny man with many good points--not all of which necessarily fell in line with the left. O'Reilly kept this smug, 'gotcha' look on his face and really only stood out when he was name-calling. He called the Daily Show audience a bunch of 'pot-smoking slackers' and its writers 'pinheads'. But that's how I see a lot of intelligent right-leaning folks, like it's all a big joke or a game. It doesn't seem like they're FOR anything. They're scrambling to reverse things or keep things from happening. There's no progression in their politics, just prevention, reversal and maintenance of the status quo.

There were lots of shades of gray in Stewart's set of beliefs, which showed thoughtfulness and care. O'Reilly was dismissive and priggish, which was off-putting, and it didn't really get any point across. I agree that Obama's first year in office has been flawed. But this mainstream GOP media outlet has whipped the public into so much an irrational frenzy, that it seems impossible for this president to get anything done.