Moe Lane

You know, I think that I want Chris Wallace to be in charge of the 2012 debates. He deserves a reward for giving Jon Stewart the business in this one:

The fun really starts at about 5 minutes in: Stewart tried what Ace calls the “Clown Nose On / Clown Nose Off” (after stating, more or less, that conservatives are incapable of understanding liberals’ motivations) and Chris Wallace demonstrated that he was expecting precisely that answer. Because, really, nobody is as smart as they think that they are. As Jon Stewart demonstrates, over and over and over again; his repeated insisting that he wasn’t being ruled by his biases kind of lost power with every counter-example that Wallace put up on the screen. But then, it’s rare on television that people are actually grilled on things.

(more…)

…over the Sarah Palin emails? Put it this way: Jon Stewart went the entire segment without slamming THAT WOMAN once.

Not ONCE. Heck, he didn’t even try.

Via Ann Althouse – who reminds us that the ‘letter from God’ had already been published in Going Rogue: An American Life. Brilliant job there, media folks: your most significant news item from this sorry exercise had already made the bestseller list. In 2009.

Via Instapundit, Jon Stewart’s tiptoe through the minefield that is Weinergate.

Contra (somewhat) JammieWearingFool, I’m not really upset that Stewart went with his, um, ‘helpful’ defense re the size of Weiner’s… genitalia: Jon Stewart and Anthony Weiner are friends, they’ve been friends since college, and Jon Stewart pretty explicitly called people’s attention to this before talking about it (not quite hanging a lampshade, but close). Also, what’s making Stewart really mad is that the blogs are the ones doing the research that the media didn’t; speaking as somebody who crafted one of the arrows that got shot at Weiner, I’m gratified that somebody else noticed. (more…)

Regrettably, it turns out that Jon Stewart’s call for a second rally to address all of the concerns that have arisen from the first rally was, in fact, a joke… OK, OK.  You either already knew that, or you didn’t know that he had called for a second rally in the first place (and would have tagged it on the spot as a joke even if you had).  Still, that rally probably sucked up valuable Democratic oxygen for the Right the veritable weekend before the elections, so we want to encourage the practice.  I can think of no better addiction for the Left to have than for them to acquire a taste for impractical smug.

:pause:

Well, more of a taste.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) Well, they always had planned to do that  (which wasn’t exactly the best-kept secret in the world), but now it’s kind of obvious.  This is, in fact, turning into the Great Democratic Hope of 2010: the goal is to convert that potent, potent force known as the ‘youth vote’ into a mighty hammer of civic engagement that will keep in office… the political party that is responsible for roughly one in five of them currently being out of work.

But OfA is planning a phone bank for right afterward!  Personally, I’d have waited an hour or two to give all those volunteering livers a chance to metabolize the ethyl alcohol that will undoubtedly be consumed on Saturday, but don’t mind me, grasshoppers.

Moe Lane

(Via Instapundit) Dag. I’m starting to think that Jon Stewart’s going to be the official Democratic BS Limit Alarm for the rest of this administration’s term: when even he can’t buy it anymore, it’s over. Witness the death of the Race Card:

Again. Dag.

As people are noting, Jon Stewart seems to be having quite the career monopolizing Blue-on-Blue comedy these days. Said monopoly is probably going to abruptly change.

Crossposted to RedState.

This pretty much encapsulates the intellectual, and I use the term extremely loosely, rigor of the antiwar movement when it comes to the GWOT:

How did he do it? It’s a question John Yoo has been getting a lot lately. How did he manage to outwit Jon Stewart? (“He slipped through my fingers,” Stewart recalled after Yoo’s recent appearance on The Daily Show. “It was like interview sand.”) Easy, says Yoo. “I’ve spent my whole career learning to settle down unruly college students who have not done the reading.”

…yes, pretty much. From what I watched of the interview I’d say that Stewart’s mistake was classic: his assumption that of course everyone agreed with his faction that torture was ordered; torture was committed; and that everything that his faction calls ‘torture’ was in fact torture caused him to walk into punch after punch.  What made it exceptionally painful (for given values of ‘painful’) was seeing Yoo take pity on Stewart a couple of minutes in and gently start presenting both sides of the core argument of What does the government need to do when faced with deliberate, unconventional attacks on its citizens? That lapse on Stewart’s part is actually a lot more damning than his inability to lay a few zingers on Yoo, but try telling that to his disappointed fanboys.

Mind you, I like Jon Stewart: he was making fun of the President back when it was still secular blasphemy.  But a man’s got to know his limitations.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

I think that the clown nose is off the face but around Jon Stewart’s neck for this one:

Via Patterico’s Pontifications. Regardless of what you think of ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – I happen to be for allowing gays to serve openly in the military – it’s embarrassing, the way that the President has shown absolutely no resolve on this issue. I didn’t think that it would have been possible to get things worse than President Clinton did, but at least he tried.  This administration caved preemptively, after talking big for years on the subject.

I’d be angrier about it if I hadn’t half-expected it all along.

Moe Lane

Crossposted at RedState.

You probably remember Susan Roesgen from yesterday: she was the one who got so peeved when the person that she interviewed turned out to be not on-script. Voluntary propagandists often aren’t, when dealing with messy reality.

Anyway, she’ll probably be lionized by CNN for her “bravery” to standing up to people yelling back at somebody with a video crew trying to browbeat them, so watch this clip while you still can:

See also AoSHQ and The Other McCain.

…because I bet you that Jon Stewart isn’t going to think that this example of hysterical “reporting” is going to be nearly as funny as her reporting of the Fargo flood was. Or overwrought. Or even as silly journalism, although that depends largely on whether he forgot to take the clown nose off. After all, floods are one thing, but at the end of the day voluntary propagandists have only got each other to cling to.

Possibly even ‘bitterly.’

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Which means that you have to make fun of the President that you have, not the one that you want:

(Via Andrew Malcolm) Don’t expect miracles, here: Stewart’s a liberal. Stewart also understands that his audience will increasingly be part of the demographic who gets bored listening to people who can’t stop yelling about that Bush guy, who isn’t even President anymore, and back on his ranch in Texas cutting brush or something: and that this is no time to be out of work. So… baby steps.

Unless Obama screws up some more. The Media is always hungry.

Crossposted to RedState.

…we actually had a spare.

We just assumed that you weren’t up for Jeb having his turn. But apparently this was a bad assumption on our part (original alert via MsUnderestimated):

…

Our bad, I guess.

Moe Lane

PS: How are your new unicorns settling in?