Feb 232007
John Stewart and Stephen Colbert have back-to-back shows on Comedy Central, and they can be really funny even though they are pretty hard Left. At the end of Stewart’s show, he checks in with Colbert for a few seconds to keep the viewers from drifting away between the two. These exchanges are most often random silliness, and one such bit a few nights ago surprised me by being entirely focused on Rand and Objectivism: we come across Colbert in a situation that shows him in agreement with and even teaching others about Rand (but a horrible mischaracterization of her).
My best guess on motivation is that Colbert — himself a parody of arch-right-wing hosts like O’Reilly — is portrayed as a screwy Rand fan because many on the Left regard her as some sort of hard-core Conservative. Apparently the little detail that Objectivists and Conservatives are not exactly chummy, and that they strenuously disagree with the association by pointing to fundamental philosophical differences, has still not registered in the world of such writers.
