Democrats Use Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’ Tickets to Raise Money

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

“How would you like tickets to be in the studio audience for a live taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart?” Sounds like an offer you might get from your local newspaper or radio station, or maybe while walking down Broadway on a chilly winter’s day.

It isn’t an offer you’d expect to hear from the Democratic Party, especially after all of the caterwauling from liberals about Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. donation to the Republican Governors Association last month. It certainly isn’t an offer you’d expect to hear from Comedy Central, which repeatedly strives to portray Jon Stewart as a relatively even-handed political basher who likes poop jokes. And it most certainly isn’t an offer you’d expect from Stewart’s show itself – Stewart made hay out of the News Corp. donation in typical fashion, explaining “if anything, the Republicans should be paying Fox News millions and millions of dollars.” But never fear: Democrats and liberals never shy away from hypocrisy when it meets their ends (think of Obama’s wailing about lobbyists, only to appoint them, or complaints about campaign funding, only to eschew public funding).

On September 7, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee sent out a mass email inviting contributors to “click here to enter for a chance to meet President Obama and tickets to see The Daily show with Jon Stewart live. We’ll pay for airfare and a hotel.” And here’s where the click leads. We’ll see whether the DSCC reports the tickets as an in-kind contribution to the party, or whether Comedy Central does – if they don’t, they both might be in violation of federal election law.

Regardless of whether or not Stewart and/or Comedy Central are knowingly involved or aligned with this fundraiser (we’re still looking into how the DSCC got the hard-to-get tickets), this email is essentially the Democratic Party’s open endorsement of Stewart. If Fox News decided to donate free tickets to a live taping of The Glenn Beck Show, it’s doubtful that the DSCC would see fit to hand those tickets out to lucky winners of its draw. But Stewart’s on their side, so they’re fine with handing out tickets to watch Stewart make funny faces. That’s the symbiotic relationship between Stewart and the Democratic Party: he makes a few funny faces about Democrats to preserve the illusion of balance, a lot of funny faces and snarky comments about Republicans to show where he really stands, and in return, liberals across America populate his audience so that he can have the nightly thrill of getting away with laughless laugh-lines.

Viacom, for the record, owns Comedy Central. And as OpenSecrets has reported, “Before it was purchased by National Amusements in 2005, Viacom gave just less than $2 million to political committees from 1999 to 2004. In both cases, the money typically favored Democrats.” The head honchos at Comedy Central are universally liberal.

Can we all agree that corporations have a right to give political money at this point? And can we further agree that Jon Stewart is liberal, and that he and the Democratic Party serve each others’ purposes extraordinarily well? Or maybe we should just ignore this story altogether and just make funny faces.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bshapiro/2010/09/14/democrats-use-tickets-to-jon-stewarts-daily-show-for-fundraising/

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