John Stewart says Goodbye...

He asks that we stay vigilant.  Here's how he put it:

BS is everywhere. There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been, in some ways, infused with BS.

Not all of it bad. Your general day to day organic free-range BS is often necessary or at the very least innocuous. “Oh, what a beautiful baby, I’m sure he’ll grow into that head.” That kind of BS, in many ways, provides important social contract fertilizer that keeps people from making each other cry all day.

But then there’s the more pernicious BS, your pre-meditated institutional BS designed to obscure and distract. Designed by whom? The BSocracy. Comes in three basic flavors.

1: Making bad things sound like good things.

• Organic All Natural Cupcakes, because factory made sugar oatmeal balls doesn’t sell. 

• Patriot Act, because, “Are you scared enough to let me look at all your phone records act,” doesn’t sell.

So whenever something’s been titled, Freedom, Family, Fairness, Health, America, take a good long sniff, chances are it’s been manufactured in a facility that may contain traces of BS.

2: The second way, hiding the bad things under mountains of BS: Complexity.

You know, I would love to

-- download ....Drizzy’s latest Meek Mill diss (Everyone promised me that that made sense) .... but I’m not interested, right now, in

-- reading Tolstoy’s iTunes agreement, so I’ll just click agree.

-- Even if it grants Apple prima nocta with my spouse. 

Here’s another one: simply put, banks shouldn’t be able to bet your pension money on red. BS-ly put, it’s - hey, this. Dodd-Frank. 

Hey, a handful of billionaires can’t buy our elections, right? -- Of course not, they can only pour unlimited anonymous cash into a 501c4 if 50% is devoted to issue education, otherwise they’d have to 501c6 it or funnel it openly through a non-campaign coordinating Super Pac with a quarter… “I think they’re asleep now, we can sneak out.”

3.  And finally, it’s the BS of infinite possibility. These BSers cover their unwillingness to act under the guise of unending inquiry.

“We can’t do anything because we don’t yet know everything.

We cannot take action on climate change

until everyone in the world agrees

gay marriage vaccines

won’t cause our children to marry goats

who are going to come for our guns. Until then, I say teach the controversy.”

Now, the good news is this: BSers have gotten pretty lazy and their work is easily detected. Looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time. Like an I-Spy of BS; so I say to you tonight, friends, the best defense against BS is vigilance.

So if you smell something, say something.