Posted 1:57 PM by Blah blah

See the most comprehensive site completely about Jon: Jon Stewart Intelligence Agency! Great articles and transcripts about him and the show.

More on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
"Liberal" and "Conservative" are Obsolete.

As I wrote before, here's more on why you should watch Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. As the world gets more grim and serious, The Daily Show stays very funny as well as politically sharp, something very rare on TV now. It's the perfect show for people like me, who are politically moderate and disagree with both the far left and far right. That's why I so strongly support both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. I feel the truth is usually in the middle.

It's hard to be a raging moderate. Humor is a sharper weapon than anger, as you saw when some people were ticked off by my rant on N. Korea.

Jon Stewart's Perfect Pitch (NY Times):
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In an interview with Mr. Stewart and Ben Karlin, the show's co-executive producer, I asked why material like this has failed, as yet, to make "The Daily Show" a target of the patriotism police who have tried to impose a rigid wartime speech code on most of American discourse, pop culture included. "It's different coming from us than the Dixie Chicks," said Mr. Karlin, who was formerly an editor of the satirical newspaper The Onion. "It's more expected that we're going to process a news event and have a take on it." Maybe, but it's also a matter of tone.

As Laura Miller has observed in Salon, Mr. Stewart is not self-righteous — an increasingly rare quality right now. This is a time when antiwar voices have often felt (not without reason) that they have to be strident to be heard above the military music, and the keepers of jingoistic political correctness feel they must be just as shrill to shout them down. "The Daily Show" is anomalously rational. "Our audience can watch without feeling like we're grabbing them by the lapels and shouting `This is the truth!' in their faces," said Mr. Stewart. "Our show is about not knowing what the truth is."

"The Daily Show" prides itself on its bipartisanship. "People ask, `Why aren't you really making fun of Democrats right now?' " Mr. Stewart says, "and we say we'd love to if we knew where they were." But what makes the show original is that it tends not to even recognize party-line categories. In Mr. Stewart's view, "Liberals and conservatives are two gangs who have intimidated rational, normal thinking beings into not having a voice on television or in the culture." He argues that they are on their way to extinction: "Liberals and conservatives are paradigms that mean nothing to anyone other than the media. Liberals were relevant when there was a giant cause to fight for — civil rights. They accomplished it so well that the only thing left for them to do now is to get women into Augusta. So what are they? And what are Rush and the Ann Coulters battling? They're still fighting the cold war. You know, Russia gave up a long time ago."...

But the relief that a viewer can take away from "The Daily Show" has less to do with its specific point of view than with its unfailingly polite but firm refusal to subscribe to anyone else's program. For those who share Andy Rooney's gloom, it's a place to find a smart take on the war that does not abide by the strict guidelines that come with either blind support or apoplectic rejection of "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

"It's so interesting to me that people talk about late-night comedy being cynical," Mr. Stewart says. "What's more cynical than forming an ideological news network like Fox and calling it `fair and balanced'? What we do, I almost think, is adorable in its idealism. It's quaint." He's not wrong. During this war, the notion of exercising cant-free speech on an American TV network, even a basic cable network, has proved to be idealistic, quaint and too often restricted to Comedy Central at 11 o'clock.
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Hear hear Jon! You capture my view EXACTLY. I'm now a member of the Jon Stewart Party.