Jon Stewart marveled on Monday’s “The Daily Show” that in the
little more than a week since Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s release, Fox
News has managed to turn the solider into a “Muslim-terrorist-Kennedy-assassin.”
The comedian played clips of commentators on the network painting Bergdahl as everything from a traitor and a deserter to “a kind of modern-day Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“In just a few days, this guy Bowe Bergdahl went from guy-who-left-base-without-permission to Muslim-terrorist-Kennedy-assassin,” he quipped.
Stewart then observed that Bergdahl’s speedy “transformation” from solider to terrorist also depended on the characterization of his father, Bowe Bergdahl, as someone who looks like a member of the Taliban. Fox News has criticized the elder Bergdahl’s beard for appearing “Muslim,” but as Stewart pointed out, he could just as easily be Amish or Russian Orthodox — or even a Boston Red Sox player.
The comedian also hit Fox host Steve Doocy for suggesting that Bergdahl’s father enabled his desertion by telling him to “obey your conscience.”
“Yeah sure, it sounds that way to some — specifically people who don’t know what a conscience is. If someone says, like, ‘listen to your conscience,’ they’re not saying ‘do whatever you want,'” Stewart said. “Your conscience is the opposite of the thing that tells you to do whatever you want to do. Do you understand what I’m saying? Your id is the thing that enables your darkest impulses. Your id. Think of it as the Fox News of your brain.”
Watch below, courtesy of Comedy Central:
While FOX is worse than garbage and Jon’s take-downs are very funny, it is the drift from the FOX sewer to the other dysfunctional media outlets that seal the false narrative deal with attention deficit America as those other outlets dress up their FOX water-carrying with junk polls and high dudgeon simulations of probity.
The right wing since Reagan seizes on any issue to propagandize.
At some point somebody really ought to tell Fox News that they come off looking like vicious idiots when they trash somebody the way they have Bergdahl. I guess that won’t happen until old white people stop watching.
Stewart has hit on it: the difference between Conscience and morality. One is a cultural phenomenon; the other innate, a birthright, covered over early in our childhood, but recoverable. Bergdahl’s father encouraged his son to keep that part of him alive. No wonder he angered the moralists.
Usually innocent until proved guilty , now it’s guilty until proved innocent .