http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/oj-3_3_06_DH.html

Quote :

"Has Washington Gone Insane? By Daniel Henninger With President Bush away for a week in Asia, the rest of Washington has had to find something to do with its time other than run amuck over the latest piddling folly. That means the news from Washington this week is close to zero. Still, like many Americans in our time, on returning home after work the past week I paddled my surfboard across the ocean of cable TV channels in search of a wave of public interest more than two feet high. And so it came to pass on these still waters that I discovered Jon Stewart seated across the table from Larry King. Mr. Stewart is the host of "The Daily Show," Comedy Central's satirical TV news program. This looked like a wave worth waiting for, and it was. The subject was Washington. Larry King suggested to Jon Stewart that the current low ebb of the Democrats and Republicans was good for Mr. Stewart's business. King: So, in a sense you're happy over this. Stewart: No. King: This gives you fodder. Mr. Stewart replied that if government "began to solve problems in a rational way rather than just a way that involved political dividends, we would be the happiest people in the world to turn our attention to idiots like, you know, media people, no offense." King: So, you don't want it to be bad? Stewart: Did you really just ask me if I want it to be bad? King: Yes because you-- Stewart: What are you--I have kids. What do you think? I want things to corrode to the point where we're all living in huts? King: You don't want Medicare to fail? Stewart: Are you insane? Insane? Spend too much time close to politicians nowadays and suddenly that's a good question. This week the New York Times in the course of deconstructing the bad relationship between the Bush White House and the pressies who shout questions at it quoted a clinical psychologist who claimed to have had as patients several White House correspondents--all suffering from what she calls "White House reporter syndrome." Something about being "emotionally isolated." This story already has plenty of clowns, so by all means, send in the psychiatrists. It is not my intent to plumb the possibility of mass psychosis in Washington, but nonetheless we must come to grips with the phenomenon of the world's most powerful capital spending so much of its intellectual energy chasing nightmares of its own imagining. Exhibit A here would be the fascinating case history of Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame. If memory serves, those of us who expect to find value in tracking public events spent more than two years on an obsessive Beltway press search for who "outed" Valerie Plame. And this was a high crime insofar as Ms. Plame was a "covert agent" for the CIA. In someone's notion of political reality, this was a big deal. Its actual size was revealed in a federal court hearing last Friday, as described by National Review's quite grounded White House correspondent, Byron York: "CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald argued . . . that as far as the perjury charges against former Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby are concerned, it does not matter whether or not Valerie Wilson was a covert CIA agent. . . . 'We're trying a perjury case', Fitzgerald told Judge Reggie Walton. Even if Plame had never worked for the CIA at all, Fitzgerald continued--even if she had been simply mistaken for a CIA agent--the charges against Libby would still stand. In addition, Fitzgerald said, he does not intend to offer 'any proof of actual damage' caused by the disclosure of Wilson's identity." No damage? So setting aside the catastrophic personal tragedy for Scooter Libby (and the possible erosion of confidentiality protections for the press), the Plame affair all those months was a forced march down a blind alley. Still, I think the Plame case has value as a window to understanding why Washington today spends more time bouncing off the walls than sticking to Jon Stewart's apparently archaic attachment to solving problems "in a rational way." Rational problem-solving generally requires adhering to the rules of the game, and in politics those rules are often informal. One such rule in Washington is that a politician is as good as his word. Perhaps nothing has been more destructive to Washington's current ability to function than the belief that "Bush lied" about WMD, most notably Joe Wilson's foundational charge in the New York Times that Mr. Bush lied about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger. This persistent belief that George Bush committed a major moral crime, which was refuted by the Robb-Silberman Commission, had consequences. It has led many people in Washington's standing institutions--Congress, the press, the intelligence and foreign-policy bureaucracies--to think they've been released from operating inside the normal boundaries that allow political Washington to function, that allow partisans to do business, whether on foreign policy, Social Security or homeland security. Over the Bush years that code has been displaced by a new ethos that to resist policies that flowed from such a "lie," anything goes--such as leaks about the most sensitive national security programs or published "dissents" by recently retired CIA officials like Paul Pillar. Compare this ethos to that of the U.S. intelligence community that ran the Venona program, producing invaluable signals intelligence on Soviet espionage activities from 1943 onward without any participant revealing its existence. No such achievement is imaginable now. Instead every issue that emerges becomes an illegitimate extension of the original "lie"--the NSA wiretaps, the Guantanamo detentions, Abu Ghraib, terrorist interrogation techniques, the Plame affair. This is a dangerous game. Raised to this level, policy becomes a super-heated moral Armageddon that makes mere politics impossible to manage. One then might ask: Do you want this government to fail? To which a tragicomic response is appropriate: Are you insane?"

3/3/2006 4:16:57 PM

http://www.mininova.org/tor/238300

the interview is funny as shit, watch the entire thing

3/3/2006 6:37:52 PM

zomg jon stewart being a sarcastic douchebag!??! totally unexpected!!!!

3/3/2006 8:32:02 PM

larry king was being the douche

he asked if jon wanted the country to fall apart

3/3/2006 8:33:24 PM

he was having fun with the guy.


I didn't see any douchebaggery in that entire video.

3/5/2006 3:29:41 AM

it was a good interview on both sides, and one of Stewart's better ones, I think.

It's obvious that Stewart has an adjenda, and he doesn't try to hide it on the show anymore. In the past, though, he would often deflect criticism off himself by playing the "we're a fake news and comedy show. We follow a show about puppets making crank calls - you can't possibly take us seriously". Whenever he said something like that, it always struck me as irresponsible of him and counter to what he was trying to accomplish. He could basically discount anything he said by claiming it's all just for a fake show.
But now he seems to be owning up to the fact that people actually do listen to him for political commentary, and yes, sometimes the news. If he really wants to use TDS to promote an adjenda, which I think he does, he needs to be straightforward with how and why he's doing it.

3/5/2006 10:00:59 AM

don't you think that is part of the act though

it allows a degree of isolation from the "liberal media" stereotype so that they CAN get away with saying things that would get cbs crucified

i mean, everybody plays the role that works best for them

hell, there are lots of people who think that bush carries himself the way he does because it connects well with his base, all those slipups and verbal mistakes are designed so he doesn't come off looking like a polished wonk that people could never connect with

3/5/2006 11:14:54 AM

bush isn't dumb

he's incompetent

it's a subtle difference

3/5/2006 11:26:10 AM

^

He's not dumb or incompetent really, middle America eats that shit up and his administration gets free reign to fuck up anything they wish because of it.

3/5/2006 11:53:01 AM

Quote :

"It's obvious that Stewart has an adjenda,"

you mean like, an opinion?

3/5/2006 12:24:50 PM

Plenty of people on tv have worse "agendas" than Jon Stewart.

And they are completely fucking serious about them.

[Edited on March 5, 2006 at 2:52 PM. Reason : ]

3/5/2006 2:49:35 PM

I don't want to download the torrent. What did King say in response to being asked if he was insane?

3/5/2006 2:56:25 PM

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gCelxz0uf6o

yea, agenda, opinion, that's what i meant.
just to be clear though, i happen to agree with most of his "opinion"s - i wasn't using agenda as a dirty word

3/5/2006 3:05:21 PM

It seemed a little douche-baggish with how John responded to Larry King saying something like "you'll notice a big difference between boys and girls" WRT John's new baby.

3/5/2006 4:53:50 PM

omf sarcasm!

3/5/2006 5:31:34 PM

Just watched the youtube clip. Seems like much ado about nothing.

3/6/2006 12:07:31 AM

it's cool, stewart dissed scientology during hte academy awards last night with travolta (and maybe tom cruise, too?) in the building.

he won't live long

3/6/2006 9:35:58 AM

agenda

I can't believe some of you actually think you're qualified to comment on politics.

3/6/2006 12:21:10 PM

qualified

what makes you qualified to say who's qualified at commenting on anything?

3/6/2006 4:46:25 PM

I can spell agenda.

Thats a start.

3/6/2006 5:24:35 PM

thanks for the input, Spelling Ninja.
and btw, I wasn't commenting on politics anyway. I was commenting on Jon Stewart and how he handles his public image. Last I checked you don't need to be a spelling bee champ to make fairly simple observations about TV personalities.

<insert witty quip about the absurdity of requiring a "spelling bee champ" to spell agenda correctly and how that relates to, oh, anything at all>

3/6/2006 6:04:54 PM

I think we all knew what you were trying to say.

And being a good speller on the internet is optional.

3/6/2006 8:04:26 PM

paging nutlickr

3/6/2006 8:42:12 PM

Quote :

"And being a good speller on the internet is optional"

beign a bad speller on teh internet covers shit like tpyos.

being a bad speller in real life means spelling shit like "adjenda".

which is just sad.

3/8/2006 12:18:49 AM

Dudes, SandSanta is a notoriously bad speller. He once tolled (get it?) me not to get my panties in a "not."

And spelling really has nothing to do with intellect.

However, I think spelling might indicate well-readedness.

[Edited on March 11, 2006 at 2:07 AM. Reason : sss]

3/11/2006 2:05:29 AM