Your Daily Governmental Satire: Jon Stewart, Take Notes.

In the school of political projectors I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing in their judgement wholly out of their senses , which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy persons were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good, of rewarding merit, great abilities, eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments people qualified to execute them; with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive, and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.

--Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels