Clive Crook doesn’t understand the nature of The Stupid or the impossibility of engaging politically in this country without first slaying The Stupid dragon.
Jon Stewart did. And does.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Neither did Barack Obama in 2009.
You truly test my patience.
“All troops left in 2011” Who are you kidding? We are still fighting there.
You have sorely tested mine.
So 3/10 to start, one provisionally.
None of which actually addresses my point that coming into office Obama worked to include the GOP rather than blasting them from day two. After all they started before day one didn’t they?
Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you the runner up for Wanker of the Day: MNPundit.
And I imagine that shallow Clive Crook also simply can’t wrap his mind around the legacy of someone like Bob Dylan. After all, Dylan had that nasty nasal twang thing going, right? What possibly contribution could he have made when he was carrying around something like that?
Interesting post by digby: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-first-of-many-daily-show-posts-im.html
She quotes Bouie: “Anyway, I think Maher and Stewart and especially Colbert are brilliant political observers and satirists — the best communicators our side has — but they sometimes succumb to the same conceits to which all of us liberals have a tendency to succumb: the overriding need to prove we aren’t hypocrites …”
And also says, which I think is pretty much perfect, “I have always had some reservations about Stewart’s “serious” commentary which I’m seeing a whole lot of liberal pundits applaud today as if that’s what made him important. What made him important was that he took the piss out of pundits.”
Clive who?
Strange. Crook seemed to have entirely missed the depth of Stewart’s perspectives. Jon could take any situation and turn it on its ear to make sense in a profound way that no other media outlet could. That doesn’t get old and that he often did it with comedic wit was delicious.
Crook’s error, it seems to me, is to blame Stewart (and Colbert and Maher) for the failings of their audiences. A large portion of their audiences lack the knowledge/information to get the jokes fully. They laugh but for them, it’s like eating cotton candy. It’s ephemeral.
My complaint about Stewart is that he too often bowed to false equivalence, both sides do it, that unnecessarily heightened cynicism.
He fell into false equivalence from time to time. But most often he was one of the few people with the insight and courage to illuminate the stupid.
I think your critique of Crook too harsh, because his critique of Stewart has a fair amount of validity.
Stewart lost me, not entirely, but to a substantial degree, with his nice-making with the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Chris Christie. Granted, he adopted an adversarial pose with O’Reilly. But he simultaneously granted him undeserved credibility by the mere act of having him on and engaging with him as though O’Reilly were a credible opponent who, though wrong, still deserved to be taken seriously. And he closed his interview with Christie (shortly before “Bridgegate” erupted) by saying “You’re a good man” in salutation to Christie as he was leaving.
That’s “Slaying the Stupid”? Not so much, I think.
Symptomatic, I think, of Stewart being not the heroic liberal/progressive “Stupid-Slayer” that many (apparently including you, boo) would like to project onto him, but much more in the mold of a “can’t-we-all-just-get-along?” centrist (see also his rally with Colbert, which while entertaining and refreshing in the toxic atmosphere prevailing at the time, was still more about extending a hand to make nice with purveyors of The Stupid than about slaying it; ditto for his [well-deserved] berating of the Crossfire hacks, which was likewise focused more on Crossfire’s promoting of partisan division and not so much on its promoting of The Stupid by he-said/she-said elevation of it to false equivalence and thereby to credibility).
So, you’re saying that a critique with which you utterly disagree has “a fair amount of validity.” Interesting.
Not as interesting as your fantasy that Stewart is a centrist, but still.
My post was admittedly more about “there are valid critiques of Stewart” (which I proceeded to provide) than “Crook’s critique is especially, particularly valid”.
OTOH, a statement like
puts the onus squarely on you to identify actual points of disagreement between Crook’s critique and mine. Merely asserting that without providing any evidence in support just doesn’t cut it (in fact, is rather embarrassing for you, don’t you think? I do!). Not saying such a case is impossible! But you certainly failed to make it — neither convincingly nor, indeed, at all.
Ditto for your assertion that “Stewart is a centrist” is my “fantasy”, despite my provision of a cogent argument — with examples! — for that premise and your utter lack of any cogent counter-argument or examples to the contrary. It appears that you are deluded (much like the entire GOP/conservative “movement”) that mere assertion of something by you can somehow, magically, make it so. But you’re wrong about that!
I’ve read a few of Crook’s columns, and I’m pretty sure that he simply doesn’t like irreverence. Or anything else that’s become popular in the last century, with the exception of some investment instruments.
Crook doesn’t go so far as to say it, but his post implies that Stewart and his Daily Show probably killed voter turnout among a segment of the electorate that would have benefited Democratic candidates. I agree. Every show made politics and politicians seem so ridiculous so relentlessly that it made me want to just give up, drop out, and never vote for one of them again. And I’m one of the many of us that has participated in GOTV, made contributions to GOTV-focused campaigns and progressive, liberal, Democratic candidates, and hasn’t missed an election in the nearly 40 years I’ve been eligible to vote. If I were younger, and more impressionable, Stewart, at best, would have made me feel kind of like an idiot for participating in the first place.
It got more and more difficult over the years to watch Stewart do the same shtick over and over and find it funny, much less find in it any reason to participate, to vote. I think the low point for Stewart was when they did those idiotic rallies several years ago attempting to show some kind of equivalence between committed progressives and Republicans that the former were trying to defeat.
Over the years some of Stewart’s stuff was funny. But even there he’s over-rated and along the way probably did more damage to progressive causes than helped them by causing especially younger, more cynical voters to just stay home and laugh it up rather than getting out and actually voting to try to change things for the better.
A particularly noticeable bit of sophistry was Crook’s false equivalency between Jim Kramer and Jon Stewart. On the subject Crook references, Kramer was wrong in the bubble years before the crash, and his wrongness hurt almost all Americans, whether or not they were involved in investments. Stewart correctly took Kramer to task with an anger that was absolutely appropriate, given Kramer’s offenses. But by Crook’s measure they’re both the same because HEY LOOK OVER THERE!!
Crook has an appropriate surname, if this piece represents the quality of his commentary.
Just read Driftglass’ take on Stewart, and what he represented.
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2015/02/situation-hopeless-but-not-serious.html
Sums it up perfectly, and brilliantly as per usual.
Hey Booman, you should get Driftglass a spot at the Monthly. Seriously, his writing and style is wonderful, and it’s a shame he isn’t writing somewhere for $.