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Stephen Colbert's Childish, In-kind Rant Doesn't Help the Country

May 02, 2017
Staff

WRITER

Comedian and TV host Stephen Colbert didn't like how the president treated a CBS reporter in a recent interview. Admittedly, the president did not behave in an admirable way, but does stooping to his level make it better?

"There's a difference between joking with people who you love, joking with people who you like and then just telling a racist joke. When you're just out telling a racist joke because you hate 'them' --- fill in the blank --- then it's no longer comedy. It's a statement," Glenn said Tuesday on radio.

RELATED: Stephen Colbert Unleashes All-out Trump Takedown: ‘I Love Your Presidency, I Call It “Disgrace the Nation.”'

Stephen Colbert clearly made a statement with his response. Not only that, he became part of the problem --- but where does it end?

"By feeding back into it, [they think] 'we're not the lying media,'" Glenn said. "Shut up. Just prove it. Just live it. Show us that he's wrong."

Listen to this segment beginning at mark 2:56 from The Glenn Beck Program:

GLENN: I want you to listen to Stephen Colbert and -- and CBS broadcast entity, what they broadcast last night about Donald Trump. Listen to this.

STEPHEN: Walking out in the middle of a sentence wasn't even the president's biggest insult to John Dickerson.

DONALD: And I think, actually, I've been very consistent. You know, it's very funny when the fake media goes out -- you know, which we call the mainstream, which sometimes I must say is you.

VOICE: You mean me personally? Or --

DONALD: Your show. I love your show. I call it Deface the Nation.

STEPHEN: Really?

GLENN: Okay. Stop. Stop. Stop.

Anybody think that's a smart move on President Trump's?

PAT: No.

GLENN: Anybody think that was a classy move?

PAT: No.

GLENN: Anybody think that you want to defend President Trump on stuff like that?

PAT: No.

STU: At least he said it to his face, I'll give him that.

GLENN: Right.

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: If you are going to get into a fight with a bully like that, what do you do? One of two things: You either punch back harder. And if the bully is -- is known to throw haymakers, you're going to get into a fight until one of you can't get up. Okay?

Only one's walking away from a fight like that. The other way to win in a fight like that is to kill them with kindness. Not play that game. The American way is to not play that game.

Now I want you to listen to Stephen Colbert.

STEPHEN: Donald Trump, John Dickerson is a fair-minded journalist and one of the most competent people who will ever walk into your office, and you treat him like that?

Now, John Dickerson has way too much dignity to trade insults with the president of the United States to his face. But I, sir, am no John Dickerson.

PAT: Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Here it comes.

(laughter)

STEPHEN: Okay.

GLENN: That is the sound of the republic dying.

STEPHEN: Let me introduce you to something we call the Tiffany way. When you insult one member of the CBS family, you insult us all. Bazinga. All right? Here we go. All right?

PAT: He's on one now.

(laughter)

STEPHEN: Mr. Trump, your presidency, I love your presidency. I call it Disgrace the Nation.

GLENN: Now, listen to this.

STU: That's funny because it's the same joke.

PAT: Similar. Similar.

STEPHEN: You're the glutton with a button. You're a regular Gorge Washington. You're the presidunce, but you're turning into a real pricktator.

(laughter)

GLENN: That's the Tiffany way.

PAT: That was naughty.

STEPHEN: You attract more skinheads than free Rogaine. You have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a signed language gorilla who got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin's (bleep) holster.

PAT: Whoa.

GLENN: Wow.

(applauding)

STEPHEN: Your presidential library --

GLENN: Man.

STEPHEN: Your presidential library is going to be a kid's menu and a couple of Juggs magazines. The only thing smaller than your hands is your tax returns. You can take that any way you want.

PAT: Okay.

STEPHEN: We've got a great show for you tonight.

PAT: Wow. He's got a great show for us tonight. All evidence to the contrary. But thanks.

STU: Yeah, his tax returns, he hasn't released those yet.

PAT: Right. He's comparing that to some body part.

STU: Right. But his tax returns haven't been released. That's why it's funny to say that. Because his tax returns haven't been released yet. And it's a good observation about his tax returns because he hasn't released those. So when he brings that up, it's funny because he hasn't even released them. I don't know if you saw that in the news.

GLENN: So the press --

STU: So horrible.

PAT: So bad.

GLENN: The press is -- the press just doesn't understand what they're doing. They just don't have any clue as to what they're doing.

When I -- when I went and started talking to members of the press and members of the opposite side. I said to them, "Please, don't make the mistakes that I made." Now --

PAT: And how much did they yell and scream about respect for the president?

GLENN: Oh, my.

PAT: Treating the president so badly. Jeez.

GLENN: That is -- look, what their response will be, "This president is so much worse -- how dare you even compare." It doesn't matter. It's the president of the United States. And beyond that, you are sounding like him. You have become just as despicable as him. When you say that, you know, look at the child-like behavior -- look at the child-like behavior, except he's doing it professionally. And so that's the little line that you have in your head. Well, I'm a comedian. That's not comedy. That's third grade comedy. That you could feel viscerally he felt that. Comedy stops becoming comedy when it it's real.

Now, every joke -- I mean, the problem with comedy is every joke, somebody is on the losing end of it, always. But there's a difference between joking with people who -- who you love, joking with people who you like, and then just telling a racist joke. When you're just out telling a racist joke because you hate them, fill in the blank, then it's no longer comedy. It's a statement.

That's a statement. And he's being rewarded right now by ratings. But where does this end? The press doesn't understand. By feeding back into it, we're not the lying media. We're not the lying media. We're not the lying media.

Shut up. Just prove it. Just live it. Show us that he's wrong. But even in their own Correspondents' Dinner, they couldn't do that. Even in their own Correspondents' Dinner, where they were the ones putting it on and then they were the ones that reported on what they were doing, they didn't report on -- on what Woodward and Bernstein really had said. What they reported on was that Woodward or Bernstein -- I can't remember which -- had made some point to the president about fake news. That it's not all fake news.

But before that, they went on and on and on about the responsibility of the media. It's a two-way street. They didn't report on that.

They didn't think that that part was important. What they thought was important was the slam on Donald Trump and the president. Zero self-reflection. It's not going to end well for the media. It's not going to end well for America. It's not going to end well for -- this is separating -- you know, here's what my mistake was: When I've said in the past, because I hurt half the country, they will look at that statement and say, "Yeah, see, he knows he was wrong, and he was hurting by lying to all of those conservatives and whipping them up into a frenzy." No, no, no. No. I was so convinced that I was right and that you were wrong, that it didn't matter how you felt. That I was right. And if you disagreed with me and the millions of people that had agreed with me, you were too stupid to get it.

PAT: Also, you remember how bad it was -- I mean, we weren't saying anything like this about Obama. We -- we were saying the guy is a Marxist. He has Marxist tendencies.

GLENN: Well, that was racist for us to say that.

PAT: That was all racist, and that was all horrible. And that was disrespectful, when we were just talking about his ideology. This is all personal stuff. These are all fourth grade insults. You're calling him names. I mean, they're doing everything they claim to be against.

GLENN: So Samantha Bee, who is a friend of mine, Samantha Bee, she's doing an interview with Mother Jones of all places. Could you go further left? And she is -- they talk about the interview with me.

Mother Jones: You had an intriguing interview with Glenn Beck at Christmastime. I love the sweaters. About our political rift. Beck had admitted that he had done damage by being so divisive. He said to you, "Please don't make the mistakes that I made." Do you think this is a time for people trying to come together or more of an oppositional moment?

Samantha says: Both. Listen, we're not in Kumbaya Town here, but you need to be able to talk to people. You need to be able to agree from time to time if we're going to get anywhere.

Once you've started a civil dialogue, it's a much smoother road to compromise. The key thing to remember is it's a daily practice and it's not easy.

Glenn and I, in the strongest terms possible, disagree on a lot of things. When you can agree on one thing, you should have no expectation that suddenly a person is converted to your way of thinking. You have to be willing to be frustrated constantly. There are certain things that we can all agree on, are terrible for America. Beck loves this country. I love this country. I chose this country. Blah, blah, blah. I have respect for the Constitution.

Great. Samantha, you are making exactly the same mistake that I made. Exactly the same mistake.

Stephen Colbert, you are both getting so wrapped up in your anger and hatred and vitriol for this president, that you are forgetting that a third of this country, if not 50 percent of this country, still like the man. Still agree with him.

And every time -- every time you do a monologue like Stephen Colbert did, it makes it impossible for someone who is either in the center -- and says, "Look, I don't like either side," to rally around you. To rally for your side. Because you're both acting like children.

Our country is better than this. We're better than this.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why do Americans feel so empty?

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.