I doubt he really wanted to, anyway.Stephen Colbert cannot run for “president of South Carolina.” It’s a very real loss because we need someone to make a mockery of our fatally flawed electoral system, and:
primaries
campaign donations/shitty nuclear-orange tortilla chips
Republicans/Democrats, indiscriminately
South Carolina
“favorite sons”
pandering
immobile hair
We cannot afford to break our political system more than it is already broken. It is already dangling by a last anorexic thread of dignity; to allow a talk show host to run for president would only demonstrate the degree to which our political system is a big freaking joke. I have to wonder what those abroad would have thought. Let’s face it, people: we cannot allow ourselves to look worse than we already are.
Also, last night, Jon Stewart quite implicitly supported the writers’ strike and maligned corporate denial of the importance of “new media.” Old school media corporations have been sluggish to jump on the “new media” bandwagon- “new media” being, of course, the internet, which has been around my entire life, in one form or another- and are trying to outright
deny screen writers monetary rights for their work sold or streamed on the internet.
Don’t worry, kids. While we might feel the loss of such great shows as the Colbert Report for a while, your
viewing of such ridiculous shows as Desperate Housewives will not be affected. You can exhale now.
The broader significance of this strike, and Jon Stewart’s support of it, is that corporations continuing to ignore the salience of emerging new markets for entertainment consumption creates more opportunity for those of us who see the significance of the internet to get around them.
That being said,
all episodes of the Daily Show since Jon Stewart's arrival are available online. Is this Jon Stewart’s doing? Or is Viacom letting me embed videos to my heart’s content to bypass YouTube? Either way, I'm not getting dressed today. Enjoy young Jon and outdated topical humor:
