Jon Stewart Calls GOP Primaries a Telethon for Electoral Dystrophy

John Stewart, as usual, had some pithy remarks to make Monday about the Republican presidential primaries, particularly as they relate to the seemingly endless series of debates we’ve been assaulted with over the past months. The tedium seems to have escaped only the media’s attention while the rest of us are thankful somebody else (here at PoliticusUSA that often means the fearless and strong-stomached Jason Easley) watches it and gives us a more palatable CliffsNotes version.

Watch the video from the Daily Show at Comedy Central:

“The remaining republican candidates gathered Saturday night on ABC television for a 9pm debate and then inexplicably reassembled the next morning at 9 am on NBC for another debate. It’s like the republican primary’s become a telethon for electoral dystrophy. It’s the fourteenth and fifteenth debate. I mean, they’re out of things to talk about.”

This is something we can all heartily agree with, and electoral dystrophy is a perfect term for it. When so many people have so little to say, it seems unreasonable to draw things out like this. It reminds me of sportcasters during a game trying to dig up more minutiae to share with us – the same things they said in the previous game when it was already old news. If there was really something to differentiate the GOP field it would be one thing, but they are all running on essentially the same theocratic-nihilistic platform while identifying Barack Obama as “not one of us” and pandering to the same narrow bloc of voters who are far from representative of the average American.

As Stewart put it, “It reveals the sad truth of running for president. No question is too trivial to not merit a pandering lie.”

“The Saturday debate was so lame there was only one thing people even wanted to talk about afterwards” – that nobody seemed to want to attack Romney. Stewart wants to know when somebody is going to kick Romney in the balls.

Romney’s balls are likely to be armored in Kevlar this election given his campaign’s financing and organization and the support he enjoys from the Republican establishment. If any candidate will benefit from Tea Party excesses in Congress, it will be Romney.

Stewart also got a chuckle out of the idea of Newt Gingrich calling somebody out for “pious baloney”, saying “that  would be like Newt Gingrich waxing poetic on the sanctity of marriage” (which as Stewart then demonstrated, he has). It’s laughs a minute with the GOP candidates, if only the mainstream media could see it. As Stephen Colbert put it, the media jumped on Romney like ‘Gingrich on a younger, healthier wife.’

Leave it to our Comedy Central pundits, Stewart and Colbert, to see to the heart of the matter. If only our mainstream media outlets were as honest we’d likely not be in the position we now find ourselves in.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.