Obama Zombies: How the Obama Machine Brainwashed My Generation (26 page)

President Bush was obviously uncomfortable. And liberals were beside themselves. How couldn't they be with lines like this: "I stand
by this man. I stand by this man, because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things, things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world."

In 2005, Colbert spun off from
The Daily Show
. He played virtually the same character, but served mostly as one of Stewart's fake correspondents. Colbert's role is the "blindly egomaniacal, Bill O'Reilly-esque talk-show host," as
Vanity Fair
described it.
⁴¹
His role was to embody what he called conservatives who "know with their heart," but don't "think with their head"--the oh-so-famous "truthiness." Liberal writer Steven Daly of the
Sunday Telegraph
in London praised Colbert as the "titular host [who] offers a funhouse-mirror reflection of the bellicose Right-wing opinionizers of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News" who dominate political discourse with "lengthy and obnoxious opinion-slots that are somehow passed off as 'news.' "
⁴²

Colbert's lines may be funny, but the message is calculated to eviscerate conservatives. At the correspondents' dinner, he continued his shtick, painting conservatives as a bunch of baboons:

I'm sorry, I've never been a fan of books. I don't trust them. They're all fact, no heart. I mean, they're elitist, telling us what is or isn't true or what did or didn't happen. Who's
Britannica
to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American! I'm with the president. Let history decide what did or did not happen.

And there's the Fox-bashing, of course. He is a fake Fox corre
spondent, after all! "Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side." But it's not contempt for Washington per se that drives Colbert, it's contempt for conservatives. His whole persona is to mock conservatives. It's to make conservatism so unpalatable that no one from his audience, TV or rival, would back a Republican. The left realizes this. In an article for the
Huffington Post
called "Obama owes presidency to . . . Stephen Colbert," Greg Mitchell, editor of
Editor & Publisher
, opined on how the "faux rightwing blowhard" has "filtered into our political/media consciousness."
⁴³

Colbert rarely gets out of character. In fact, he spends nearly his entire day in it, by his own admission, and he looks forward to driving home and listening to his playlist, so that he can be normal again (conservatism to him is abnormal) when he gets to his wife and kids.
⁴⁴
Colbert is a sitcom taken seriously. But there are rare glimpses into what motivates Colbert.

Most revealing was an interview he had with Daly of the
Sunday Telegraph
in May 2008.
⁴⁵
The interview occurred in Colbert's Manhattan office, and since Daly is a fellow lib, Colbert let his hair down. Daly, like most on the left, affirmed the character of Colbert as the pretend "Fox News Bill O'Reilly" who "takes great pride in shouting down unpatriotic," or as Daly wrote, "dissenting" guests and "occasionally having their microphones switched off mid- sentence."
⁴⁶

Explaining the inspiration, Colbert noted: "At the heart of this is America as the chosen country of God. It's conflation of the Statue of Liberty and the crucifix: American religiosity and American destiny are one and the same. That's why George Bush was chosen by God to lead the world. Manifest destiny is an old idea, but now it's just expressed in different ways."

Continuing his rare expression out of character, Colbert said,

The odd thing about the triumphalism of the character is that it works best in an atmosphere of victimhood. These characters [aka conservatives] say people have personal responsibility and they attack people for playing victims. But an ongoing theme with the Christian Right in the U.S. is the "War Against Christmas." That somehow there are sinister forces--read Jews, Muslims, lesbians--that wish to destroy Christmas. It ignores the fact that Christianity is more dominant with our culture than in any other Western society. In a way, they're very much in line with language an Islamic fascist might use, talking about the decadence of the West.

Not so funny, eh? Colbert is earning his leftist street cred with statements like that. It's a peek into the worldview that drives the character that is Stephen Colbert. Like Stewart, Colbert offers an apologia for liberalism. He attempts to bat down conservative arguments. Colbert is giving us a line that we hear from liberal outlets such as the Daily Kos and MoveOn.org.

Daly noted that the day the interview took place was also the day when Susan Jacoby, author of
The Age of American Unreason
, was booked on the show. Jacoby, a liberal, offers a blistering critique of "the same pathology that Colbert embodies," wrote Daly. That pathology the liberal author defined as "bullet-headed, patriotic incuriosity."

"Knowing things that other people don't know is the definition of elitist," Colbert said in character while interviewing Jacoby. Before the cameras were rolling, Colbert told Daly that his "conservative" persona has more trust in "the invisible hand of the
free market" than in "knowledge" and "facts." "The market will take care of poverty. I call it dribble-down economics," he said mockingly. "The rich eat everything--and don't get me wrong, I'm rich--and some of it crusts on their beard, and the poor are allowed to feed on their beard. You can't say they're not being provided for--that's class warfare."

Much of his material is funny. Conservatives aren't humorless, as the false cliche goes. But we understand, and we've seen the effects, of the man who will address a Hollywood audience as "godless sodomites." We understand his worldview. And, more importantly, so does Colbert. Speaking of his "mentor" Bill O'Reilly, Colbert says, "I have a genuine admiration for O'Reilly's ability to do his show. I'd love to be able to put a chain of words together the way he does without much thought as to what it might mean, compared to what you said about the same subject the night before."
⁴⁷
By turning conservative ideas into satire and jokes, he and his merry band of eighty-six staffers
⁴⁸
have helped lobotomize a generation of Zombies who have written off the successful ideas of limited government and free markets. Colbert even warns his guests that "he's willfully ignorant of everything we're going to talk about."
⁴⁹

YOUNG PEOPLE ARE
increasingly getting their news from Colbert and Stewart.
⁵⁰
A poll released by Rasmussen Reports found that 30 percent of those ages 18-29 say that both
The Daily Show
and
The Colbert Report
are replacing more traditional news outlets;
⁵¹
35 percent disagree and another 35 percent are undecided.
⁵²
Amazing! Nearly a third view the dynamic throne sniffers as legitimate news outlets, and another third are not sure what to think? America, your future is not looking good.

Many young people even boast of their fondness for news delivery via liberal comedians. Jen Jablow, an anthropology major at the University of Pennsylvania, said during the campaign that "I think of watching network newscasts as something my parents do. I can't imagine my friends sitting down to watch an actual network newscast at 6:30 because we're doing other things at that time. It's a lot quicker to go online. I customize my news." Like many her age, Jablow is hooked on Comedy Central's fake news shows.
⁵³

I'm certainly not saying they should go back to the Brian Williamses and Katie Courics. No! Lord, have mercy! Quite the opposite. The cultural shift is obvious, a shift that Obama picked up on. But replacing any type of traditional news source with acerbic comedians is crazy. Young people would rather laugh than think, feel than analyze. Humor is a feeling, so it plays right into the left's best weapon: emotion. It's the liberal disease: Give me free goods and services! Have those damned "rich" people pay for them! I'm entitled! Me, my, me, my! The left has gone from trusting Dan Rather and Brian Williams to following the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Ideologues masquerading as "fake journalists." Of course, a generation raised on
The Simpsons
and
South Park
has a tendency to abandon a network evening format that hasn't changed in decades.

Stewart is cool! Colbert is cool! Obama is cool! See the narrative? Heck, back in 2006
Rolling Stone
's cover story declared Stewart and Colbert "America's Anchors!" Matthew Kolasa, a University of Pennsylvania student, admitted that he learned a lot by watching
The Daily Show
. It's not just for laughs. "Within his political satire, Stewart makes really interesting points. He can make an argument with such smartness and wit. I think the U.S. senators could take a lesson from him."
⁵⁴

Taking on the image of an egomaniacal character comes easily to
Colbert. His dark personal life, with the tragic deaths of his father and two brothers when he was a child, left him emotionally scarred, toying with his identity, even the identity of his last name. It was always pronounced Colbert, not Col
bear
. As a kid, he immersed himself in a fantasy world of role-playing games, science fiction novels, and Dungeons & Dragons. Colbert was a wandering actor, a wannabe poet, and a standup comic. He's devoted his life to playing someone else.
⁵⁵
It's an exercise in self-hatred. Hopefully Colbert finds
his
voice, not somebody else's.

There you have it--two men angry at life, masking their anger and sorrows in comedy; they are unpaid volunteers for liberalism, and cronies for Barack Obama.

A Six-Point Battle Plan for Awakening Obama Zombies from Their Brainless Slumber

Okay, so we've identified the chicanery of Barack Obama and his Zombie-inducing surrogates. We've blown past the rhetoric versus the reality. We've demonstrated that Obama is not the second coming of Jesus Christ. We've seen a president who distrusts his country, genuflects to dictators around the world, and takes massive dumps on the idea of American exceptionalism. Meanwhile, as we've also seen, the journalists covering him are more interested in being on the Messiah's good side and helping him govern than in holding him accountable.

So now I'm going to give you a few quick tools for deprogramming Obama Zombies and waking them from their slumber. Engage
ment is the key. John "Grandpa" McCain was an awful candidate with an even more awful youth outreach program. The GOP is in big trouble if they don't have steadfast engagement. The numbers aren't looking good. The GOP is getting older,
¹
and younger voters are aligning with liberal candidates. Republicans are increasing in age, Democrats decreasing.

Now granted, much of the mania has to do with the Cult of Obama and the fact that today young people become liberal through osmosis--they just don't hear conservative ideas argued in academia, Hollywood, and most of the media.

Yep, so there's a problem.

Yet there are glimmers of hope. With all the heavy doses of liberal nonsense they are exposed to on a daily basis, young people still break only as 31 percent liberal, 30 percent conservative.
²
Heck, I'll take 30 percent right now. We can easily build on it. ObamaMania is showing signs of cracking. As the reliably liberal Associated Press even noted, since the election the Obama "fervor has died down--noticeably." "While young people remain the president's most loyal supporters in opinion polls, a lot of people are wondering why that age group isn't doing more to build upon their newfound reputation as political influencers."
³

The "dorm storming" people for Obama on campus have stopped; the dancing in the streets is over; the bouncing Obama girls on YouTube have faded. The sizzle has fizzled. And that's why conservatives need to wake up and take action.

The youth vote is vital. "Millennials," or whatever we are called this week by political scientists, could possibly make up the single largest voting bloc in the future, so conservatives need to get with the program; we need to shake, rattle, and roll Obama Zombies and get
them to do what their liberal lobotomies have prevented them from doing--
thinking
!

Here's a six-part battle plan for how we can do it:

1. Back to the Basics

It can't be stressed enough: John McCain was an atrocious presidential candidate. Gramps was uninspiring, inarticulate, and uncharismatic, and he looked like death. To some ignoramuses in Washington and New York, however, McCain's loss is a sign to give up conservative ideas, to buck conservative principles, and to appeal to so-called moderates.

That's the wrong direction. We need an unapologetic espousal of the core principles of conservatism: limited government, a strong military, traditional values, and personal responsibility. John McCain banked his presidential aspirations on "reaching across the aisle" and his supposed appeal to "independents." The problem is twofold: First, it doesn't work, or else we'd be addressing President McCain right now. And second, voters respond favorably to those candidates who passionately and persuasively present their ideas. That's why the so-called moderate bloc swings back and forth like a pendulum. It's not static.