An open letter to Jon Stewart

[Initech]

Dear Jon

Let me first start by saying I'm one of your biggest fans. Watching the Daily Show, it's reruns, and correspondents, particularly those of Lewis Black, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Ed Helms, and Rob Corddry has kept me from going berserk, especially during the worst of the Bush years, and now what is to become the worst of the tea bag years.

However, your message which started at the Rally to Restore Sanity, and continued into last night's (1/10/2011) opening monologue was that you cant predict crazy. That we should continue to compromise and find common ground.

With last weekend's shootings that took the lives of six innocent people, and serverly jeopardized that of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, I'm done trying to find common ground with the Republicans. I'm done compromising. They have, for years - ever since Fox called Bush for Florida despite clear evidence showing Gore won - been stomping on us liberals, the "little guy". Actually you could go even further than that - back to when Jimmy Carter lost and Reagan won. That's really the start of this kind of crazy. There is no excuse for the violent rhetoric that is spewing out of the minds of the likes of the Limbaughs, Hannitys, and Coulters of the world. There is no excuse for the Michelle Malkins and Glenn Becks. There's no excuse for this:

"I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus—living fossils—so we will never forget what these people stood for" - Rush Limbaugh

Or this:

""The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians"" - Pat Robertson

Or even Glenn Beck openly advocating for the murder of Michael Moore - a frequent guest on your show - on his show. It's that type of mentality that has caused us to predict this type of crazy. I've said for years that they wont rest until someone gets killed. And by they, I mean "the teabaggers". The anti-government crowd. Somalia would be a place for these people to live. A place where everyone has guns, and no one's in charge. That would be their ideal government, and sometimes I feel like that's where we're headed.

I really hate to bring up another tragedy - the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, but it's really the only favorable comparison I could make. Or how about the tragic shooting of a Knoxville, TN Unitarian Universalist church, which the shooter said "I wanted to kill all the liberals in the house and senate".

It's a huge pattern that's only going to get worse unless we stop it. You are in a position to get people to stop it. The crap that is being spewed out of the mouths of the right is so violent and hateful that it would make even the most hardcore death metal bands blush. And the difference between hardcore death metal and what Rush Limbaugh says? We know the death metal bands are here for our entertainment.

Limbaugh isn't. You may say "Oh but Limbaugh and Beck and his ilk are just here to entertain us." They're not. They're pundits with an agenda. One that is very dangerous and very scary - the ultimate false equivalency they have been able to come up with is that of the liberal media. There really isn't. It's right and far right. I have many close friends and relatives who listen to and take these people seriously. And it's that line of violent thinking that leads to mob mentality, and mob mentality is not good for any government, past, present or future. Mob mentality got the teabaggers elected in the first place, and the next Congress is going to wreck serious havoc on the lives of everyone it touches. Thanks to this incident, and the only good thing to come out of it, is that right-wing bullies have been exposed for who they are. And they're in full-on denial mode.

That said I will continue to watch and laugh at the mistakes that these people make on a daily basis. Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this.

- Initech