Jon Stewart Bashes Obama as Hypocritical Enemy of Civil Liberties

On Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” host Jon Stewart powerfully attacks President Barack Obama as a hypocrite and power-mongering opportunist regarding the writ of habeas corpus and other legal standards as protected under the U.S. Constitution. As Stewart shows, Obama repeatedly claimed that he was going to reverse the unconstitutional assaults on civil liberties by the Bush Administration, but has instead deliberately continued and indeed worsened such intrusions.

Stewart presents Obama as a supporter of a police state and then compares him to Frodo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterly legendarium, The Lord of the Rings, in which the commoner Frodo succumbs to the lust for the power of the Ring in order to own, dominate and destroy others and reveals that he is no different from the stalking, self-absorbed, twisted, deformed, and depraved character of Gollum. In so doing, Stewart is saying that Obama’s power mongering is fully in keeping with the profound warning of Lord Acton when he noted that:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”