Jon Stewart the host of the Comedy Central program the Daily Show recently did an interview with Donald Rumsfeld that was hardly an interview. He basically let Rumsfeld spout whatever lies and distortions he wanted without calling him on any of it. I replied to this event with a video pointing this out.

I made the point that there is no “other” opinion prevalent in the mainstream media. The interview showed that even though Stewart is a well-known liberal, he was unwilling to present that view point, or at least even challenge the statements made by Rumsfeld. This is a systemic problem that flows through all mainstream media regardless of claimed ideology.

Stewart has stuck again with his phony liberal ways. On Monday March 7th he conducted another interview with a well known conservative by the name of Rand Paul. As you well know Rand Paul is the son of Mises funder Ron Paul. (Of course as Ron has previously stated his son is not named after Ayn Rand.) The anti-corporate, corporate funded candidate Rand came on the show to promote his Tea Party book, a book about him and some information on the Tea Bagger movement.

Jon Stewart, in what is now his typical fashion, failed to call out Rand Paul on his blatant lies. Several incidences of stated falsehoods were permitted to pass without inspection. Moments like these would leave any Jon Stewart fan wondering with side of the political spectrum he’s really on.

One particularly striking moment was when Rand Paul began his adamant defence of coal power. He said that people don’t understand that coal is necessary to continue powering America. He acted as though coal producers were these poor abused victims. The people in his view were mercilessly abusing coal producers. He implied that the people were too dumb to realize that we “need” coal power, the un-thinking dumb masses were lashing out at the coal producers like “stupid worthless-mud” as Ayn Rand (the person he’s named after) called people.

Rand Paul literally said, “…using coal power isn’t the end of the world”. Actually it is!

Why didn’t Jon Stewart point out that in fact we don’t need coal power at all? If we combined wind, solar, tidal and wave power together we’d have more than enough to power the entire world. There literally is no reason to be using coal or any polluting power at all. Stewart was dead silent on this fact. He basically gave the “there is no global warming” propaganda line air time without challenging it. So much for his liberal, “we must combat global warming” position.

Rand Paul would even be given a free hand to spout his father’s market fundamentalist garbage without being challenged. Paul stated proudly that the banks should have been allowed to fail, or as he put it, “to be disciplined by the market.” Of course in reality, had that been done, the entire capitalist system would have collapsed very quickly. I’m not complaining mind you, I’d love to see that happen. It’s his ignorance of the event that makes me laugh.

Exactly how is capitalism supposed to continue if it collapses? I suppose its an unimportant question anyway because that’s not REAL capitalism anyway. Only the completely abstract centuries old and doesn’t-exist-in-real-life capitalism that counts. Again dead silence by the liberal Stewart.

Its starting to become more and more obvious even to the most uninformed that there is no real political dissent in the mainstream media. It is a fraud of bourgeois democracy that needs to be combated.