Jon Stewart, the hypocrite girly-man who blasted Crossfire for being too entertaining and Sen. Ted Stevens for being too accurate in his description of the Internet, has been called out:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Mocked by comedian Jon Stewart for calling the Internet a bunch of tubes, U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said on Thursday he is open to going on Stewart’s popular “Daily Show” for a rebuttal.
Stewart makes his living selling the cynicism of the stupid to the clueless, so I doubt he has the balls to face Stevens face-to-face.
Here’s a nice comment on Stevens’ metaphoric description on CNet by Rod Adams:
I thought that old Ted did a pretty fair job of concisely describing a complex issue about a complicated system using words that had a chance of being understood by most of the people he was talking to. Unlike most of the people who have been commenting back and forth, the man has made his living for many years by trying to fit complex thoughts into sound bites or short speeches. He is, after all, an elected official.
The Internet is a network with as much variation in traffic capacities and flow as the road network. There are portions that are the equivalent of cow paths, dirt roads, city streets full of traffic lights, parking lots with improperly designed entrances and exits, and wide open freeways in Montana or West Virginia. There are intersections, security gateways, and “mixing bowls”. The volume of traffic on each of these portions is also variable by location, time of day and major events.
Stevens might very well have had difficult with receiving email in a timely fashion – his office is, after all, probably served by a network with tightly controlled firewalls, insufficient capacity (I am a government employee and understand how poorly designed some of our networks are and how slow they are to be upgraded) and probably multiple layers of routers and switches trying to add more drops or backbone wiring.
Stewart did a good job introducing Beavis and Butthead on MTV; the Comedy Central show has been less well-done.
I think that’s a bit too harsh on Stewart, especially since his show has been one of the few venues to rightly rip the current regime a new one over their incompetance and malfeasance.
This net neutrality thing is not being handled well by the progressives; I can agree with you on that.
But let’s face it: the government we have has been the worst of our lives, bar none, and Stewart’s been the closest thing we have to H.L. Mencken that we have today, and while it’s a nice MSM meme that Stewart’s pushing “cynicism,” it’s also a self-serving meme, with “conflict of interest” written all over it. Oh, and not to mention, it’s false as well: participation of younger voters was higher in 2004 than in previous years.
Put down that Washington Post, Richard; it’ll rot your brain.
But Mumon, Stewart claims he’s not a serious political commentator, just a comedian. That’s part of his criticism of Crossfire. So how can we praise him for doing what he says he doesn’t do?
Of course the role of the King’s fool was to say things that the courtiers could not or would not say.
So, no, Stewart’s not a “serious” political comentator, just an honest one.
If he were honest, I’d have no complaint about him. Anybody and everybody can criticize the president of the United States without any substantial fear of reprisal, and many people do. If Stewart wants to pretend he’s not a political player he should stop inviting politicians to appear on his show, and if he can’t do that he should at least stop performing video fellatio on his idols among them.
Is Jay Leno (or Conan O’Brien, or David Letterman, or … ) a political player on the basis that they interview politicians and criticize via humor? I don’t think The Daily Show intends to be political in a way that you appropriate to it. It is on the Comedy Central channel and isn’t meant to be consumed as political editorializing any more so than the other late night talk show hosts making fun of whomever so happens to embarrass themselves in the news.
If you can’t see the humor in his depiction of Ted Stevens, then I have to wonder why you would be entertaining yourself with a comedy show. It’s supposed to be funny, no?
Stewart isn’t in the same business as Leno and Letterman, as the content of his show (the few times that I’ve been able to watch it) is almost exclusively political. He’s more or less a political cartoonist, while the others are general purpose entertainers. Political cartoonists are on the editorial page, where they hope to influence policy debates in one way or another.
It’s basic honesty to acknowledge that, but Stewart can’t quite muster the courage to face up to what he is. Perhaps his defense is that his audience is too stoned to deal with policy in detail, so his humor is all they can handle while passing the bong.