Jon Stewart's opening comments on Charleston, 18 June 2015

[Jack Rabbit]

[center]

[/center]

[Dustlawyer]

1. Nails it! This is the heart of it in very blunt terms! Thank you Jon, you will be missed

as well!

[Spitfire of ATJ]

2. He still didn't label it as coming from the Right Wing.

[Jack Rabbit]

3. He didn't need to

It's getting a little late, so pardon me if I am uncharacteristically sarcasm impaired.

A white loser walks into a black church carrying loaded weapons and shoots the place up, killing nine people. Only FoxNews and Republican presidential candidates wouldn't call that right wing, even if they actually know it is.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

8. They have already tried to spin this to be an attack on them....

By saying it was an attack on Christians that means this kid MUST have had his head filled with hate against Christians so it's the fault of the liberal, secularists that are destroying traditional American values.

Bet they're digging around to see if it can be implied that he's gay too.

[Jack Rabbit]

10. So?

You're not foolish enough to believe that, are you? Stewart's audience is typically better informed than FoxNews viewers, who are lost souls in any case.

Fox has to be very careful when spinning the shooting as an attack on Christianity that they don't report that Mr. Roof himself has said his actions were racially motivated. It is the most obvious and artless spinning of a story I've ever seen from Fox, and that's saying a mouth full. I'm sure most of their regular viewers are falling for this, but it wouldn't surprise me if a sizable number aren't.

Look again at the tape of Fox and Friends spinning this with E. W. Jackson. The propaganda is palpable. As an example of bad journalism, it stands on its own without comment.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

11. They should pull their White House press pass.

[Dustlawyer]

7. He didn't need to, he kept it simple. They know who they are, no need to politicize it.

The stark simplicity, boiling it down to the very heart of it was what made it so effective.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. He's too polite.

[SheilaT]

4. A gaping wound that will not heal

and yet we pretend does not exist.

Wow.

For many years I've thought that race, and the entire slavery thing, is the fundamental existential issue of this country.

I am a white woman whose grandparents came to this country around the turn of the 20th century, well after slavery and the Civil War, and yet that legacy is also a part of me.

I have had the good fortune to become friends with a handful of African Americans who have been willing to listen to my sometimes ignorant questions, who have explained to me what I need to know, who have never made me feel stupid or bigoted. To them I am immensely grateful. Thank you, friends.

[Jack Rabbit]

5. Most of my ancestors were here well before that

I had ancestors on both sides of the Civil War. Some of my ancestors owned slaves. My middle name is my great grandmother's maiden name. Her parents owned slaves until they moved from Kentucky to Ohio. I don't use my middle name. That is a purely personal choice.

All branches of the family moved to California by the Great Depression. My mother, who was born in Nebraska, never saw a person of Asian ancestry until she was 21. She had two children. Her daughter married a Japanese American man and her son married a Korean woman. My mother thus became the grandmother of four Eurasian offspring. All of her descendents will have Asian blood in their veins, forever. In addition, I have Mexican cousins and a relative in the east bay who is black.

To me, this is America.

[SheilaT]

6. Almost all of us have relatives that straddle the color line.

Four days ago, my nephew brought home his son, his son's two brothers, and a cousin of the sons. I'm going to be deliberately vague, and say that the cousin is African American. I was at first startled, simply because I didn't know about this cousin, but quickly adjusted, thinking to myself, Okay, cousin Kenton is this way. I am VERY grateful that I have this sort of connection across the racial divide. It is far too easy for too many of us to not understand such things. I like it that sometimes I'm confronted with our stupid racism, and I hope I rise above it.