John Stewart calls out MSM over Ron Paul

Did you guys see the show? What do you think?

I think your agenda is repetitive and rather tiresome at this point.....

Wait, Fox is part of the MSM now? I feel like I need a scorecard.

Rohn Paul?

Isn't the whole "Why isn't anyone covering this?!?!11?!" a Glen Beck schtick?

Er, Stewart always talks about things the media doesn't cover. Paying attention to the media is most definitely a Daily Show staple.

He's dead on about this. Paul has been one of the top contenders (thus far) in the race, yet he gets no attention. Sure, he's a loon, but he's no crazier than Bachmann or Perry.

Here's a piece on the differences in coverage between Johnson, Paul, and Huntsman. The piece asserts-- rightly, I think-- that the biggest difference is that Johnson and Paul are challenging systemic and institutional dysfunction within our system, whereas Huntsman is challenging positions within his own party seen as fringe by the mainstream.

It's a good argument. It's a lot easier to untangle a candidate who's position is "evolution is real" compared to "we need to end the War on Drugs and close three-quarters of our military bases around the world".

But even more than that, the simple answer is this: Ron Paul is perennial crazy. He gets as much coverage as Ralph Nader does in any given election year, which is not much (unless he's calling the President-elect a house slave). Ron Paul has time-honored crazy. His positions are well-known-- at least by the media, if not the electorate-- and rightly or wrongly, many of them are too radical to be taken seriously. By this I mean radical in the sense of wildly out-of-step with mainstream beliefs, I don't mean it as a pejorative or to say that all of them are flatly wrong (such as his stance on the War on Drugs).

Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Cain? That-there is some brand-spanking-new crazy. And if the media loves anything, it's the shiny new toy.

Sorry. I was referring to our little Beck clone.

Well, there's also the fact that there's virtually no chance Paul can win the nomination. We know this because in 2008 after making some fairly large showings in some early pre-election contests that played to his strengths, he quickly turned into an afterthought once the real primary campaigning started. The same thing will happen here and the media knows it. He may have out-performed expectations in an Iowa straw poll format that was essentially right in his wheelhouse, and he may finish a strong second or third in New Hampshire, but once the deep red primary states start voting, he's going to get crushed and everyone knows it.

There is a plausible possibility that candidates like Bachmann or Perry can win this thing. The media has been focused on them in part because they recognize that possibility.

Just about all major parties have some interest in making sure Ron Paul doesn't win.

The conservative media doesn't want him because he'll lose the general election. He has a tendency to make himself look crazy, and he'll look even crazier standing next to a calm, collected Obama.

Liberals don't want him to win because he doesn't believe in the constitutional precedent of separation of church and state, he's pro-life, he's for capital punishment, he's an evolution denier, and the deal-breaking list goes on.

Religious conservatives don't want him because he's supported stem cell research, he voted for the repeal of DODA, he's supported gay marriage (albeit sort of loosely), he doesn't want to aid Israel, and he's against the War on Drugs.

Fiscal conservatives don't want him because he supports environmentalism (albeit only at the state level), opposed Federal subsidies to oil and gas companies, and he opposes wars that many businesses have exploited for large profits.

So he has a very narrow appeal. He's got a lot of fans now, but I suspect it's because a lot of them don't really know much about him. Early 20's stoners who think he's awesome don't realize that he's a creationist who doesn't agree with 9/11 truthers (this is an example, and describes a Paul supporter I knew).

But apart from the liberal objections noted above, I just don't think he'll be a good president. Being president means you have to talk to people and negotiate. While I agree with him that many wars we've persecuted are not necessary and should have been avoided, I don't trust him to be able to diplomatically solve any major foreign affairs problems. He's not unique in this - I wouldn't trust Bachmann or Perry, either.

But Paul has the unique disadvantage of holding positions that all sides will deem "crazy," while making himself look crazy in the way that he argues things. Obama has been consistently described as cool, calm, collected, and reasonable. I've never seen Ron Paul exhibit any of those attributes.

I guess my point is that by NOT paying attention to him, the media is helping him (at least in these early stages).

Oh dear.

I think this is more of an anybody-but-Obama type of response, but still.

And I'm sure Obama is terrified of Ron Paul. He's probably only slightly less scared of him than seemingly the rest of the Republican Party who ignore him completely. We've seen-- over a variety of studies-- that the Tea Party is simply old school, hard-right, social conservatives. I don't see them getting behind a guy who wants to make it easy for their kids to buy heroin on any corner, regardless of how much it would lower their taxes.

Other/Don't Know: 2012!

Generic Republican seems to get the best polling, time and time again. Which really says a lot about the fallacies of the two-party system.

<<<Amazed at some of you.

Wow! let's keep supporting our useless President, because we sure don't want to say he/we were wrong. Clueless.

He's only useless because his hands are tied by the GOP and the fact that the rest of the Dems bend over quicker than a crackhead for a $5.

Welcome to 2001-2008.

Oh fuck straight off. Have you looked at what most of the people here say when President Obama comes up? He isn't exactly popular with anyone. The difference between, say, my criticism of him and yours is that I don't seek out news that can be twisted to feed my deep and irrational belief that the President is some sort of closet-Muslim-fifth-columnist-secret-socialist-Santa who's out to destroy America. There's a difference between calling a President useless and clueless and saying quite accurately that he's been less than stellar at fulfilling some of his campaign promises or advocating for the ideologies he professes to believe.

Further, just because many eeeviiiiiil liberal posters on this site aren't exactly pleased with Obama, they're not so far gone that they're ready to jump into bed with an insane bunch of religious nut-jobs who want to create a modern-day, nuclear-armed theocracy, nor are they at all likely to throw their support behind a man who's understanding of economics seems to be grounded in a pre-industrial revolution, pre-Emancipation Proclamation agrarian view of how the economy should work (regardless of empirical evidence) just because he'd be okay with them hitting the bong in the privacy of their own homes.

Jesus, you would be simply amazed at the world if you could only pull your head out of your own ass for all of sixty seconds.

So let's all go vote for the crazy, ranting uncle instead!

Current events FuckOff.

Mike Singletary wasn't the reincarnation of Bill Walsh that I'd hoped he would be, but he was still an improvement over Mike Nolan. In a similar vein, Obama isn't the liberal stalwart/FDR reincarnation I'd like, and if one came along that promised better I might support him instead. But he's still a lot better than Bush was or McCain would have been.

I don't think there's any cluelessness required to appreciate that much nuance.

You know, in some ways it's sad that he'll never come near the nomination. It's true that I would never, ever vote for Ron Paul, but at least he has a few views that aren't completely batshit. I'm not so sure I could say the same for the actual Republican frontrunners.