Jon Stewart’s response to Paul Krugman is very funny. See for yourself. It’s also very interesting.
Yes, very interesting, Jonah. But stupid.
To take this from the top. Last week The Daily Show did a glib, dick-jokey bit on the platinum coin idea. Paul Krugman, and others, responded by saying that the segment was trite and not funny because Stewart clearly didn't understand the point of the coin and why it had come up in the first place. Then the other night Stewart replied with another, slightly less dick-jokey bit (embedded below) wherein he essentially said neener, the platinum coin is stupid because it's stupid, you like it when I make dick jokes about Fox, huh, right don't you huh.
It wasn't much of a response, but whatever.
Stewart is good at two things, dick jokes and main-stream & far right media dismemberment. I have no problem with dick jokes -- why, I may possibly have made one myself once, many years ago. And Stewart is clearly brilliant when it comes to skewering the media.
But when his show takes on other issues (especially political or economic) it's hit or miss. And the misses are usually when he lazily takes an "all sides are equally wacky I'm so reasonable" posture which is not so distinct from bog-standard High Punditry. When he really wants to go after, say, Fox, note how he'll do some real analysis, digging up old clips and looking stuff up. When it comes to something like the platinum coin, it doesn't occur to him that he might not understand the issue -- it's doxa that We Must Be Serious about the Debt. It's Very Serious Impersonating, with dick jokes as cover.
None of which means I don't like the show. You just have to take it for what it is -- sometimes brilliant, but sometimes blinkered.
Which gets us back to Goldberg, who is never brilliant, and not so much blinkered as a person who makes a living as contortionist able to stick his head up his butt from many different angles at once.
Krugman was scandalized by The Daily Show’s mockery of the trillion-dollar coin idea. I don’t think I’m shattering anyone’s illusions when I say that Krugman is extremely arrogant and thinks of himself as the infallible Pope of progressivism and the Dean of the Reality Based Community. So when The Daily Show, which many see as somewhere between the official spokesman and the Court theater troupe of those constituencies, mocked an idea Krugman has championed, well, something must have gone terribly wrong. Hence, Krugman says that when Stewart just pretends to be a know-nothing while mocking complicated things as dumb Stewart is in fact “hurting his own brand.”
All of which is the usual cud-chewing. With the usual attempt to pass off far-right gibberish as Very Serious Stuff through a rhetorical back door: Stewart is
absolutely right that liberals will forgive Stewart everything and anything when he’s skewering the right, no matter how unfair. What I think he misses is the degree to which the show’s biggest fans don’t realize how unfair the show is to the views it mocks. The college kids who get all of their news from The Daily Show, think it’s funny because it’s true, even though they have no clue what the truth of the matter is.
Note the utter lack of anything here that resembles, well, evidence. When has Stewart been "unfair" to the right? In what instances? There are these things on the Internet known as "hyper-links" -- could Goldberg employ one? Is there evidence that there exist "college kids who get all of their news from The Daily Show"? Is there such a thing as Wikipedia?
Krugman responded to Stewart on a specific point. By ignoring the specific point -- why the platinum coin was proposed -- Goldberg gets to pretend that There Are Big Serious Conservative Ideas that are Unfairly Ignored or Maligned.
Which is even yet still more proof that one of the most striking features of Movement Conservatism is the appalling laziness that makes even the High Pundit class look like they're working. Shit, even Tom Friedman gets out of the mansion once in a while to talk to cab drivers. Goldberg demands that he be Taken Seriously without ever figuring out how to make an argument past the third-grade level. ("Nuh-uh, you're the fascist! Nuh-uh, you're the one who uses cliches!")
"Wingnut welfare" doesn't even cover it. If you can't get ahead in the Marketplace of Ideas, insist upon a policy of Affirmative Reaction.
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Paul Krugman & the Trillion Dollar Coin | ||||
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