Doesn’t Pass the Laugh Test
Anyone who doubts that Comedy Central’s The Daily Show is about the best source of no-bullshit news on TV should catch last night’s episode when it’s re-run. After a classic opening bit with jabs at both Clinton (“anyone notice how his integrity is highest when the situation is at its most hypothetical?”) and Bush/Cheney, host Jon Stewart conducted perhaps the most savage interview I’ve seen on American TV in quite some time.
His guest was Stephen Hayes, a hapless hack from the Weekly Standard gang who had the misfortune to release a new book on the supposed Saddam-Al Qaeda connection in the past few days, timed nicely to coincide with the 9/11 Commission’s finding that there remains absolutely no evidence of a collaborative connection (e.g., meaningful rather than incidental) between the two antipodes in Bush’s “war on terror.” (His defensive and singularly unpersuasive answer to the critics here).
Stewart is usually rather respectful of his guests. He has had William Kristol, Richard Perle, Karen Hughes and many other very partisan supporters of the President on to promote their books and talk about their ideas. Stewart inevitably opens and closes with a strong plug for the book, lets the subject finish his or her sentences, keeps the conversation moving, silences the crowd if they become too rowdy, and immediately changes the subject if the guest tries to flatter him or talk about the show. Most of all, he is inevitably well-prepared and more than occasionally seems to have actually read the book or know a little something about the background issues. Screaming head pseudo-journos and more than a few seasoned professionals could learn a lot from this stand-up comic about effective interview techniques.
Hayes, who looks like he has problems with questions like “paper or plastic?” clearly had no idea what he was in for. Stewart started immediately by very gently questioning the factual basis for the book – some intelligence on supposed Saddam-Al Qaeda links that neocon mastermind Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense, had conducted independent of the CIA and had boiled up into a 14-page memo widely regarded as crackpot even by others within the Administration. “Is this the way these things are usually handled?” inquired Stewart.
Things went downhill for Hayes from there. Faced with persistent, intelligent questioning and quick-witted follow-ups from Stewart, Hayes could do little but squirm in evident discomfort as he was unable to answer the central question – even if this intelligence implicated Saddam with ties to 9/11, don’t Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Pakistan seem to be far guiltier of worse offenses? Why pick on Iraq, pressed Stewart, when 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, financed with Saudi money, and may have received operational support from branches of the Saudi security force?
This gets to the heart of the whole neocon boondoggle: the whole series of unanswered questions about Chalabi, the missing WMDs, the stubborn unwillingness to allow the inspections to go on just another 30 days, and finally, the harebrained lack of planning the followed the invasion, which Stewart memorably described as a “clusterfuck.” If you can’t make the connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam – and, increasingly, it looks like you can’t – then the question of what Iraq really has to do with the “war on terror” looks increasingly damning for the President.
Usually, when an interview has turned up some unpleasant truth, Stewart has the grace and timing to step back and let the victim recover, tell a joke and lighten the mood, which also allows the audience to admire his handiwork. Not tonight. Stewart continued after Hayes with a baseball bat, laughing in his face at one point when he tried to assert something as a “known fact.” “It seems to me that when you write a book like this, you have nothing to say about ‘known facts!’” Coming back after the break, Stewart led off by saying to his interview subject, “With all due respect, this book is a crock of shit.” Sadly for the author, there was little he could do to refute what seemed at that point to be an obvious statement of fact.
Stewart’s opponents try to paint him as a raving liberal in the Michael Moore mode, but he is so much more deft and ambiguous – not to mention actually funny – that they can’t make it stick. He has had laugh-fests at the expense of some on the Left (Denis Kucinisch is a regular target, and I would pony up pay-per-view to see Ralph Nader come on for an extended interview), celebrities, and phonies of all shapes and sizes. As a satirist, his target is absurdity: it’s not his fault that the Right provides him with such a rich field of play.
Steve Gilliard has a nice post on this today as well.
11:48:09 AM 
|
|
