The Constipated Conservatives

Harry Stein attempts 'scathing' (and fails) in an Opinion Journal criticism of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. Stewart has been praised up and down as being a fearless voice in a politically correct world; Stein disagrees. According to Stein, Stewart is just another liberal, and his jokes are little more than another way to skewer Bush. But Stein misses the point: Stewart is liberal and everybody knows it. Unlike the Anderson Coopers and Chris Matthewses of the world, he's not pretending to be fair. Nor, like Tucker Carlson and Paul Begata, whom he famously brought low, is he just a party organ. He's a liberal, but he knows the truth when he sees it. That's why the routine that Stein quotes as the epitome of Bushwhacking was actually quite the opposite (I saw it):

...with the democratic tide rising in the Middle East, he acknowledged that maybe President Bush's policy in the region hadn't been so loony after all. He admitted that such a thought left him full of "cognitive dissonance," but "when you see the Lebanese in the streets, you say, 'Oh my God, it's working!' " "Pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, 'Reagan was nothing compared to this guy,' " Mr. Stewart added, cradling his head in his hands. "Like, my kid's gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it."

"Well," comforted his guest, a diehard former Clinton official, "there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget."

"Iran and North Korea," echoed Mr. Stewart hopefully, as he thrust crossed fingers up in the air for luck. "That's true, that is true." At least somewhat reassured, his audience roared.

Harry Stein does Stewart a service in his article. There's nothing like the dour daggers of a humorless, constipated conservative to make a comedian look smart.

Of course, InstantReplay isn't entirely unbiased. As an occassional Daily Show viewer, I take issue with Stein's assertion that the majority of Stewart's viewers have no coherent political philosophy nor any sense of history. The reality is that they are (empirically) one of the smartest audiences in front of a television, for a simple reason: if you don't follow politics and world events, you don't get the jokes. The Wall Street Journal needs to be a bit more careful in finding decent opinion writers, and maybe they need a moderate liberal on the editorial board to weed out the truly stupid conservatives.