He's compared Chick-fil-A to apartheid-era South Africa, News Corps chief Rupert Murdoch to an Arab dictator, and called Christianity a death cult. So naturally Time magazine humor writer Joel Stein is the perfect person to appoint himself write a "tongue-in-cheek" Democratic Party platform heavy on snark and equally heavy on hard-left positions on fiscal and social issues. Just as well, I suppose, as left-wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is too busy dreaming up fictional biased newscasting that embodies his dream of an even bolder, more transparently liberal media.

Stein noted that he "enlisted the help of Elaine Kamarck, a public policy lecturer at Harvard and former platform author," adding that her take on his seven-page draft was that he "mostly... [has] the tone right" although the actual platform wound doubtless be "a bit drier."

In the December 19 edition of Time magazine, humor columnist Joel Stein pleased the liberals in his "Year of the Meltdown" review of 2011 by comparing Fox News-owning mogul Rupert Murdoch to murderous despots: "Throughout the year, leaders who for decades had ruthlessly wielded absolute power melted down: Zine al Abedine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Rupert Murdoch."

Since it wasn't enough to allow one factual collapse per column, Stein also  suggested we're now "full-on feudal" with an "angry 99 percent" after  Occupy Wall Street protests, and "It's too late to cool the rods. Either we're going to abandon the old structure altogether -- nuclear power, the euro, Arab secular rule, unregulated capitalism -- or wait a really long time for things to get better."

Time’s so-called humorist, the columnist Joel Stein, wisecracked in the latest issue that the time for an American dictatorship is here.

It’s probably not surprising that a columnist who’s boldly liberal enough to declare "I don’t support the troops" and mock Christianity as a "death cult" would talk family members into supporting Barack Obama for president. In this week’s Time magazine, columnist and "humorist" Joel Stein writes about how he worked to convert his liberal Hillary-favoring grandmother in Fort Lauderdale into an Obama voter and puzzled over how Obama can win over Florida Jews. He was "elated" he won his grandma over for Obama:

As I sensed Mama Ann was changing her mind for no good reason, I started to wonder what my good reasons for supporting Obama were. Did I really think that he'd get us out of Iraq all that much faster, that he could actually deliver health care to everyone or that he'd erase the anger between the parties and races? This is a guy, after all, who is no better than I am at stopping his grandmother from saying racist things. Sure, I like that Obama makes people feel optimistic and willing to give, but if I really liked that, I'd have a better attitude toward Scientologists. The truth is, I like Obama because he's young and eats arugula and knows who Ludacris is. Because he's the closest thing to the person I'd really like to vote for: me.