Jon Stewart - A Funnier David Broder

I am watching Jon Stewart's interview the Rachel Maddow.  I am a genuinely big fan of the Daily Show and find Stewart to be funny and charming on the show.

But as a more serious critic of both politics and the media, he comes up woefully short.  His aversion to ideology and partisanship leads him to engage in some really specious equivalencies between left and right.  It also leaves him in a position where he won't actually engage with genuine questions of right and wrong, true and false -- thus questions about Bush approving waterboarding are avoided by casting aspersions of the framing and motives engaged in from the left (and not so far left, see, e.g. Sully).  Ditto the question of weapons of mass destruction.

In the end, he doesn't really have the intellectual chops -- because of temperament not a lack of brains -- to really critique on a broader basis our political and media culture.  He places a premium on civility, politeness, moderation, a conceding of good faith to your opponents -- that actually is the kind of approach that plays into the hands of our opponents.  And is also weirdly delicate for a comedian.  His need to defend the teabaggers from ridicule and scorn is really annoying.

I keep hearing the REM lyric "irony was the shackles of youth."  And Jon Stewart really is old enough to know better.    

Comments

[oddjob]

and not so far left, see, e.g. Sully

Seriously.

If you can't see that drowning someone, yet making sure they don't actually die from it, is torture and must be named as such, what good are you?

[oddjob]

I keep hearing the REM lyric "irony was the shackles of youth." And Jon Stewart really is old enough to know better.

On November 28 Jon Stewart will turn 48 years old.

Certain sorts of comedy work really well when you're twenty-something, and not so well later in your life.

[Corvus9]

"irony was the shackles of youth."

"What's the Frequency Kenneth?"! I love that song! Might, actually, be my favorite REM song. Love, love, love that guitar tone. Listening to it right now.

Oh, and yeah, it sounds like Stewart has jumped the shark.

[big bad wolf]

i love what's the frequency kenneth. still, not to be too picky, but it is not clear to me that it is irony that is hampering stewart. it seems more likely that it is his sincere belief in the efficacy of civility and reasoned discourse that impedes his critique.

[Corvus9]

Oh, and because it hasn't been said yet—that blog title? Ouch.

[Sir Charles]

Corvus,

I, too, love that guitar tone. Appropriately enough for the album from which it was drawn, it's a monster sound. (I rather like the guitar sound on "Crush with Eyeliner" too.)

I confess to getting drunk enough in Key West to have sung it in a karaoke bar -- they had a strangely hip set of songs -- I did "Bizarre Love Triangle" as well -- very trickly lyrics when your blood alcohol is about .25.

[Sir Charles]

bbw,

Sometimes you are such a goddamned lawyer. You gotta give me a little bit of poetic license here.

Actually right now I am seeing Stewart being oddly sanctimonious and humorless in these interviews -- I am thinking of both his recent sessions with Maddow and Terry Gross (although I guess he was ill while on Maddow).

[oddjob]

Fortunately Key West is too small, and has too many pedicab alternatives for you to have had to worry about getting behind the wheel of an automobile in that state. ;)

(If I'm lucky enough to afford it, which I very much doubt I will be, I'll retire to Key West.)

[Sir Charles]

oddjob,

I don't think my liver could take retirement in Key West, although I love the place. Coincidentally I happened to be there on business for four birthdays in five years -- with meetings that started at 7:30 AM. Only once did the clients have to give me a wakeup call -- after my 45th birthday. I made an impressive sight at the meeting -- no shave, no shower, and the same clothes as the night before.

It is one of the great stumbling distance towns in the world. I wouldn't get near a car there.

[big bad wolf]

i felt bad, SC, yet couldn't stop. my recovery group meets again tomorrow; it's been slow, but they say i am making progress.

i love irony, which should therefore be the death of me. i don't like the cheap pop culture snark or chortling at people whose tastes are different from you, but the real deal, the statements delivered straight-faced that mean precisely the opposite of what they seem to or those times when things come out exactly the opposite of the way the actor intends, such as when john stewart helps vicious republicans by restraining criticism of them in the name of civility.

[oddjob]

I don't think my liver could take retirement in Key West, although I love the place.

If only I more enjoyed the flavor of coconut than I do, and if I more easily liked, and was willing to easily learn, the Spanish language than I do, I daresay I'd probably spend my retirement in Cartagena (Colombia). I know my housemate wouldn't complain! :)

Unfortunately, I have my limitations.

[litbrit]

I felt the same way--exactly the same way--while watching Rachel's interview.

I love Jon Stewart, but he really made me uncomfortably at several points; so much so, in fact, I was talking to the teevee when there were only two purported liberals on the screen, no-one else. Weird.

Suffice it to say, I was troubled and even kind of angered, really, by the both-sides-ism Jon displayed.

I did not start out from a place where I hated the man George W. Bush. I did not like him, but I did not like the idea of a Republican president, and I did not like what I had learned of him thus far (i.e. via listening to him speak, or rather, try to speak; also, via reading about the failed businesses, or about his being an ultra-rightwing governor who executed folks with seeming abandon). As the awful acts piled up, I began to grow angrier at the lack of counterweight, the apparent nonexistence of any checks and balances: this man was doing horrible things and getting away with every single one, thanks to 9/11. I found that reprehensible.

Anyway, Stewart extolling the virtues of making nice with "people who think differently from you" when the person in question was a war criminal--one who was responsible for so many deaths and so much destruction--was insultingly, condescendingly out-of-touch. Both-Sides-ism at work, ladies and gentlemen.

Jon Stewart, either you have an ulterior motive or you're not as smart as I thought you were. Either way, not good.

[Joe]

Sir C and Litbrit, I think you're wrong about Stewart. I don't agree with him, but I don't think his theories are completely useless. Stewart isn't willing to draw every inference against the likes of G.W. Bush and the Republicans. I'm certainly willing to draw more inferences against the Republicans than Stewart, but I do see his point.

For instance, I understand that we all hate Bush for his administration's various warcrimes. But, couldn't any one of us attorneys create a defense of G.W. Bush as to his policies when compared to all other modern presidents and most other world leaders.

Was Bush's behavior in Iraq and Afghanistan worse than Winston Churchill's directives in regard to colonial India and Iraq ? Churchill ordered poison gas to be used on Iraqi rebels. He was a brutal racist towards Indians and he probably caused a terrible famine during World War II in India.

Was Bush's policy of regime change worse than Clinton's repeated bombing of Iraq, Kosovo, and the Sudan ? Was Bush's policy of regime change worse than those Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam ? Was Bush's behavior worse than FDR and Truman during World War II ? Isn't carpet bombing cities just as bad as torture and ordering the prosecution of a ground war ?

Was Bush's manipulation of intelligence in Iraq a worse offense than the Gulf of Tonkin incident ? What about the assassinations of Salvadore Allende or Mossadegh in Iran ? Isn't assassinating and fostering coups just as bad as creating a climate for regime change ?

And finally, is regime change worse than propping up the various rigthwing dictatorships and right wing insurgencies every president from McKinley onward has had to accommodate himself to ? Are Bush's policies objectively worse than prosecuting a civil war through proxies in Guatemala, Columbia, Peru, Nicaragua and El Salvador during the Cold War ?

I'm not saying I agree with this defense of Bush. I am saying that conservatives and Republicans could very well find Bush's behaviors to be within a continuum of modern American presidents (and presidents in the 19th Century were, if anything, worse-- especially when it came to treatment of Native Peoples, Latin American nations, and in suppressing slave revolts).

Stewart is more willing than us to put Bush on that continuum. I don't think that really renders Stewart stupid per se.

[oddjob]

Not that they wouldn't try, but I think that given that President Reagan signed off on an international treaty that banned, and regarded as a felony, exactly what the George W. Bush administration embraced as a matter of regular policy, today's Republicans would have to deny an extraordinarily large body of American law (not to mention international law) that already plainly holds George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, etc., etc., etc. as international war criminals.

[Lisa Simeone]

Now, now, Sir C, I think it's the title of this post that presents a false equivalence.

I didn't see the Stewart interview in question (with Maddow), so I don't know what happened -- I'll go watch it later on the intertubes. (I have, of course, seen plenty of other Stewart shows, and plenty of times when he's held politicians' feet to the fire.) But I do know that the best interviews occur when you don't just go along and agree with everything your guest is saying. The point is to draw them out, get them to say what they think, get them to defend their position. Otherwise it can quickly devolve into a yuk-yuk fest or become just plain boring.

Just asking a question doesn't necessarily mean one is tacitly agreeing with the premise of the question (not in interview land anyway, maybe in legal land). Again, I haven't seen the segment yet. But I don't think Maddow should get a pass just because she's "one of us." The Biblical quote about about seeing the mote in another's eye but not the beam in one's own comes to mind.

As for his interview on Fresh Air, I heard it and don't see how he came off as humorless or sanctimonious.

[Sir Charles]

Lisa,

In this case it is Maddow interviewing Stewart for a full show -- and I think he came off as sanctimonious as hell. And in this case it is Steward I am not giving a pass to, even though he is something of a liberal icon.

My complaint about Stewart as an interviewer (and I do understand he is trying to be polite and host a comedy show) is that he gives a forum to some pretty repulsive folks -- Newt Gingrich leaps to mind -- and he often rolls over and turns it into a yuk fest. Every now and again he does get tough with a guest and he can be brutally effective.

Maddow's interview of him is very serious and she pushes at his tendency to engage in false equivalencies. He is, I think, not terribly persuasive in response.

I did not hear the entirety of the Terry Gross interview, but I did think there was a tone of sanctimony in some of it -- not as bad as the Maddow interview, but still there.

Joe,

I don't think that I was suggesting (nor do I think was Deborah) that Stewart is not a very smart guy. I think what we were suggesting is that he confuses civility and politeness with being ideologically substantive, i.e. it's not nice to call George W. Bush a war criminal and it's not nice to call Barak Obama a foreign born Muslim usurper. The problem is that one of those accusations is true and the other false, no matter how impolite each assertion is.

I agree that one can argue that what Bush did is on the continuum of some other really bad presidential behavior and would agree with both you and Stewart that things need to be viewed in context. Having said that, I do think there is something qualitiatively different about a president launching an aggressive war against another country and publicly endorsing the use of torture from that which has gone on before.

As you know there is little in the menu of presidential misbehavior that you list that I would endorse here, although I think both the World War II and Balkans examples really cry out for context.

I think my broader point -- that Stewart seeks to substitute politesse for politics remains valid.

I think bbw's rather pithy summation -- that Jon Stewart helps vicious Republicans by restraining criticism of them in the name of civility -- is slightly harsh (maybe even impolite) but pretty accurate in this case.

[Joe]

Sir C, I don't think that substituting civility for politics is Stewart's point. I think that Stewart is arguing that the overheated rhetoric creates noise and emotion that prevent political compromise and/or "deliberation" from which agreement can come. Deliberation is more than compromise-- it is actually understanding the other's point of view and adopting some of it by empathizing with the other's interests. According to some theorists, you can't/don't start seeing the other person's point of view until you calm down and see the other person.

I don't agree with that critique as I think its clear that strong rhetoric can have effects in the public sphere; because too much of the Right's identity is wrapped up in the culture of ressentiment and cultural conflict; and because I don't really know if a continent-sized country can undertake true deliberation.

But it probably does work in a smaller context and make sense. For instance, you and KN have tried ever so gently to tap down my overly assertive style in this comments section. You believe (probably correctly) that a less confrontational style leads to "deliberation." (although you probably wouldn't call it that). I think that Stewart wants that on a national stage (as well as people like Cass Sunstein). I think thats impossible, and we are facing the zero-sum politics of austerity for a good long time. But I don't think Stewart's theories are completely vapid.

[Mandos]

But I don't think Stewart's theories are completely vapid.

Well, they're vapid in the sense that Obama's apparent bipartisanship-fetish is kind of vapid.

[big bad wolf]

alleged war criminal. (sorry, i have no self control).

i think there is much to the civilty/calm down.overheated rhetoric theory. i also think that the civilty theory does not require false equivalences, and it is there that stewart errs. let's take the obama/bush example. about the obama lie it is very possible to say, in a civil manner, you will not say that on my show, it is a ridiculous lie spread by the uninformed or the evil. about the bush war criminal claim, it is very possible to say, in a civil manner, on my show we do not use that term, though i am happy to discuss facts with you that show actions upon which people can draw conclusions (he can enforce this; he gets the final edit). and he can say something similar when asked questions on other people's shows. with luck, stewart would say it more amusingly and charmingly than i have. but if he doesn't what he needs to understand and stop is the false equivalences, not necessarily the civility. a clever comedian, as with a clever lawyer, can destroy another's argument and crdibility without raising his voice.

i tend to agree with joe that over the span of a continent it is difficult to hold a deliberative conversation. there is a need for tag lines and strong statements. strong statements do not, however, need to be shouted or couched in relentlessly disparaging terms. or at least i still hold out some hope of that.

[Joe]

bbw and Mandos, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't recall Stewart drawing a false equivalency between left and right as to substance. I think Stewart is drawing an equivalency between left and right as to a desire to crowd the other side out of the cultural discourse. Using terms like "Teabagger" is meant to shut down conservatives-- to make them seem silly and unworthy of being listened too. So is using terms like "feminazis" "hippies" etc.

In that regard, Stewart's right. We are trying to deligitimize the Tea Party point of view (or at least we should be). I know I am. I'm not interested in debating Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. I'm interested in defeating them, and I can't see any point in engaging them in anything like good faith deliberation.

Stewart disagrees with this tactic. I think its the only effective tactic available to actually affecting public policy on a national stage.

P.S. bbw, Why don't you use capital letters for proper nouns ?

[big bad wolf]

i'm going on what i read here on the false equivalencies. i almost never have time to watch t.v. or even youtube excerpts (no holding myself above by saying that; there's just so much to do and i am so inefficient at doing it.) i would disagree with stewart that teabagger should not be used. i do think it should not be shouted, except in limited circumstances when shouting it might be warranted and i do think that it should not be used to shut down conversations, again except in limited circumstances where that ight be warranted. i have a strong bias toward the usefulness of conversation. we have to be strong and i agree we have to delegitimize some points of view for ours to succeed, but i think that there are pithy, less inherently provoking ways to do that. i may be too 20th century here.

as to capital letters there are a number of reasons. i'm contrary, leveling, lazy, required to be very careful about everything in my professional writing and thus happy to let down in email and comments, and i like e.e. cummings.

[Lisa Simeone]

Ha, ha, touché, mon ami, but let us remember that Edward Estlin signed his name using caps! It's only others who adopted that cutesy all-lower case thing, riffing on some of his poems.

[Sir Charles]

As I hope is evident here, I am all for consversation in politics, and I am even willing to start out by being polite -- well, at least some of the time.

But I am not willing to treat hateful liars like they are respectable people; I am not willing to engage Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh like they are anything but hideous liars and demagogues, and I am not going to grant a level of coherence and good will to the tea party folks. I think all of these folks need to be read out of respectable discourse and that the job of a decent media would be to expose their lies and incoherence. Oddly enough, Stewart's show does that remarkably well.

But he doesn't want to go that step further and draw the logical conclusion that engaging these people is pretty useless because facts and logic mean nothing to them.

It sounds like, after all this, that Joe and I are pretty much of the same view.

[Lisa Simeone]

Okay, I just watched all 49 minutes and 26 seconds of Rachel Maddow's interview with Jon Stewart (at Talking Points Memo http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/11/jon-stewart-stands-by-criticism-of-cable-news-in-interview-with-rachel-maddow-video.php?ref=fpb).

And I have to say, wow, did I get a different impression from that represented here. First, to quote him, "discourse isn't always precise." So let's bear that in mind as we go back and forth on this (and other) topics.

I thought he came across as reasonable, thoughtful, and trying tremendously hard to make important distinctions. No, I don't think that waterboarding is comparable to interning Japanese-Americans during WWII, so if he was presenting that as an "equivalence," then no; but I do get what he's saying about teasing out the implications of the terms people use. In that case, it was "war criminal." Yes, I do believe that Bush is a war criminal. And I do believe in calling a spade a spade.

But I also know that Obama (his administration) has continued the practice of extraordinary rendition, that he continues to imprison detainees at Guantanamo, that he is still allowing warrantless wiretapping. Now, what are we going to call him?

But that is merely one example and not the whole point of what Stewart is getting at. For that point, I have to again refer to that biblical passage I half-quoted above. It is easy to get caught up in one's own orthodoxies, it is easy to sneer at everyone else, and it doesn't advance the discussion, especially if you are a news outlet and not just someone gassing off at a dinner party or on a blog like we're doing here.

I thought the meat of the matter finally came to the fore at 44 minutes in, when Maddow gave a very clear analysis of what she tries to do in her show and what Fox doesn't. And Stewart conceded her point. (He conceded something else somewhere earlier, too, but now I forget -- 49 minutes of parry and thrust is a long time!)

Overall, I'm totally on board with his contention that there are more than two sides to every story, as I've said till I'm blue in the face -- sometimes there are three, sometimes four, sometimes ten -- but you'd never know it by watching/reading/listening to mainstream news. That when the media presents everything as either Right or Left, Red State or Blue State, it diminishes the conversation, it thwarts understanding, it impedes progress.

One more example and then I'll end my rather ineloquent attempt at explanation in this thread. On election night, at the house of friends, we were switching back & forth between channels but mostly watching MSNBC. At one point, even though I'm obviously sympathetic to the Left, I just couldn't take the insider clubhouse snickering anymore. It wasn't news coverage, it was a back-slapping, one-upping-each-other free-for-all. And I think that's what Stewart is talking about.

[big bad wolf]

i did not know that about how he signed his name, Lisa. i just like the lower case of the poems. Big Bad Wolf :)

[big bad wolf]

lisa, that last point is perfect, i think. it's not just about how they act, which is often atrociously, it is also about how we act.

SC, i am confident that everyone who has spent more than a moment here understands your willingness to converse and engage, in an erudite and gracious manner (we also like the rowdy stuff). it may be that stewart suffers from the same defect i do sometimes: he thinks he is more able than he is to show the incoherent republicans or self-described "independents" the illogical, insconsistencies that afflict their positions. i have no excuse, as i rarely persuade anyone of anything, but stewart does reach people, if not the ones he most wishes to, so it is easy for me to see why he might think he could reach more if he could get people to listen.

[Sir Charles]

Lisa,

I think Stewart's analysis fails to get at the fundamentally different nature of Fox News and Beck and Limbaugh, at all, versus say what Maddow does. It seems to me that this is a very important flaw in his reasoning. And from the point of view of political effectiveness, quite deadly.

I don't think that this is being thoughtful -- I think it is elevating politeness above a more essential analysis. And his continued invoking of "corruption" as the thing that the media should be looking at is particularly bankrupt when it pretends that there is no greater analysis of power relations and the like required to properly report on such a thing. In other words, Congressman having $90,000 in their freezer, bad though it is, is qualitiatively different than what the Halliburtons and Corrections Corporations of America get away with in our system. Reporting on the latter is terribly lacking in our political culture, because the media are by and large in bed with the same system.

bbw,

I think that what you describe is why I link Stewart to Broderism -- it's of the "if only everyone would be more reasonable" school of thought and I just don't think that's ever going to happen. What needs to happen is to assemble some sort of progressive majority and get our program enacted and leave the other guys out in the cold.

As both you and I agree I think, the fetish for bipartisan cooperation is largely silly. We have different parties for a reason -- no one expects the Labour Party to vote with the Tories or vice versa. I don't know why we should.

[Joe]

Sir C, I never said we disagreed. I said I understand Stewart's viewpoint and I don't believe it to be vapid or meritless.

On a personal level, while teaching a class on law to graduate students, I have to bring out deliberation and comprehension. I have to engage texts by people I disagree with quite alot (like Richard Epstein or Richard Posner or various conservative theorists). My job is to make sure the students are seeing every angle.

However, politically, I think I need to be much more of an advocate. I have to communicate with the purpose of presenting my point of view and marginalizing conservative points of view. As George W. Bush likes to say, I think we have to hurl our propaganda out there repeatedly to get it to sink in. Stewart thinks differently, but he's in a different place than I am as a political activist.

Now, even if I sat where Stewart sits, I don't think you can have true deliberative discourse with the Right as currently constituted (for the reasons set out above). But if the prominant voices on the right consisted of Richard Epstein, Will Wilkinson, Brink Lindsey, Richard Land, Paul Ryan, David Frum, and Lindsey Graham ? Well maybe we could. Would it lead to better policies and a better public policy ? Maybe it would. Maybe every now and then conservatives do get things right.

I've learned alot about administrative law from public choice without buying the critique whole hog. I think Edmund Burke and Hayek have made important insights.

[Sir Charles]

Joe,

As I think you are saying, dealing with Richard Posner, a very smart and ultimately pretty flexible jurist -- a guy my firm has won several cases in front of -- is a lot different than dealing with say Sarah Palin or Jim DeMint. Sadly, the Republican Party has turned its back on brains, facts, science, and the quest for decent policy.

In a different world, we could actually cross the aisle from time to time and achieve better results. More importantly, we could, when there is no winning majority, still carry on with the essential functions of governance in a compromised but reasonable way, a luxury we do not presently have and one which is deeply detrimental in our non-parliamentary system.

[Lisa Simeone]

If the right were represented by the likes of William F. Buckley, even though I disagreed with almost everything that came out of his mouth, then I think we could argue in good faith and compromise with the Republicans. But WFB must be turning in his grave at what the Tea Party hath wrought.

[big bad wolf]

SC, i think that the difference between broder and stewart is that broder writes as an insider, largley to insiders, and that stewart is reaching for a larger audience. that the audience is different makes the value of their approaches different. broder is simply silly. the inside, congressional disagreements that he writes about are not, and should not be if elections mean anything, simply put aside in order to pass some watered-down version of the plan of whichever party has won more seats. broder should be lamenting the fillibuster and holds, not pretending that congress should just get along and find a middle neither likes (broder likely thinks solomon solved the problem by cutting the baby in half.)

stewart is not playing to congresspeople or political activists, though he talks with them. stewart is playing to his audience and he seems to think that, if he can tone the rhetoric and vitriol down, he can get his audience more engaged in their polity and that might spread. stewart, i think, wants reason to rise up from people to congress. stewart, to use the solomonic analogy would like to foster an atmosphere where no one has to threaten to cut up the baby because we've talked it out beforehand. that is likely a naive hope, because even if the people were more reasoanble and informed the money powers could probably block or diffuse the effect, but from stewart's chair it is not necessarily silly to try to further that hope. it may, as i said above, backfire on him, but it doesn't make him silly in the way broder is.

[big bad wolf]

i should say SC that i agree that "[w]hat needs to happen is to assemble some sort of progressive majority and get our program enacted and leave the other guys out in the cold." i am not sure how, if at all, jon stewart affects us in that goal, but i think it is possible that by turning down the vitriol and rhetoric that the less informed, less active voter hears, he may help us a little bit in the long run. we do deal with facts and comapssion, both of which are better heard in a quieter room. stewart obviously sets the wrong tone for the activist community, but the only hope we have is that the broader community hears us. shouting down has its place, but so do other tactics.

[litbrit]

I am the same way with political crowds of either stripe--I don't enjoy being immersed in a backslapping, ha-ha-we're-so-much-better crowd any more than I like being the lone member of the left having to listen to people slam the president over and over (and worse).

There are indeed more than two sides to most stories, which was another important point Stewart made.

In fact, I agreed with a large portion of his arguments, swirling and serpentine though they were.

But in this age of information--where most Americans, at least, have access to multiple sources of news--I am disheartened that Stewart thought it of primary importance to be civil and not paint as evil someone who did some very evil things, yet got away with it (Bush).

Fair enough--I will concede that it's possible he might not be an evil person but simply someone who committed evil acts, but that begs the question as to whether, in the end, that distinction matters to the dead bodies who resulted from those evil acts. Does it matter to their survivors? Will it matter in the history books?

In past wars, with other leaders, there was nowhere near the volume of information readily available to people, and one could be at least somewhat forgiven for believing one's leaders and going along with their warmongering when they told you the country was in grave danger. Fear is a powerful motivator, and fear of the unknown is powerful and then some. With regard to Bush's various declarations and explanations, and the lead up to the Iraq invasion and beyond, well, we all had access to the facts--even in the beginning, before the yellowcake fakery was known, before many things were known, there was enough "wait a goddamned minute..." stuff to give one pause--but a combination of media irresponsibility and personal ideology led to a large number of people supporting Bush's actions, no matter what he said or did.

Lisa points out that President Obama has failed to halt many of the hateful policies and simply continued along with them in place, which is true. I have spoken out against them, too. Had he initiated the Iraq war, the extraordinary rendition and illegal torture policies, and/or the increasingly violative and intrusive domestic security policies, I'd have been equally aghast, never mind that he has a D after his name. I would have criticized him; I do criticize him.

That's what I'm talking about re: Stewart's false equivalencies. One side seemed, and continues to seem, utterly incapable of recognizing that the "bad behavior" by the Bush administration (and as continued in part by the Obama administration, yes) resulted in a body count well into the six figures, and furthermore, in the refusal to accept/assign responsibility for it and hold the leaders accountable under the law.

And the President himself, it appears, moves further toward, and into, that side with every passing day.

I say all of the above in my own voice, which, I promise you, is resolutely un-raised, un-shrill, and un-shrieking.

But I say it, I mean it, and I stand by it.