Jon Stewart Rules

I mean, that's hardly even a controversial statement. But today, he apparently did something really important. More important than the vast majority of his Daily Shows. He appeared on Crossfire and just effing killed. But not just in a comedian sense, in some sort of greater sense.
Now, I don't have cable, but I read the transcript and saw up a clip of it at the Agonist and have concluded that Jon Stewart is my hero.
People ask, "who would have thought that it would take a comedian to take on politics in a way that isn't awful and corrupt?" And I think that shows the bizarre and almost unbelievable cultural illiteracy we have in this society. People imagine comedy is something insubstantial, but only bad comedy is insubstantial. Just think about the fact that people who watch the Daily Show tend to know more actual facts about the political scene than pretty much any other group, including and especially those who suck at the teat of cable news and talk radio. What does it tell us?
Self-selection might explain it to some degree, but the fact remains that the Daily Show will actually call bullshit while Fox News and Rush spin anything for their side, and the rest of the news media treat every conflict between "right" and "left" as a competition between equally meaningless fables (what Stewart called "theater"), that is, unless they've gotten their orders to treat Bushco with kid gloves, which is quite often. The Daily Show, and by extension, Jon Stewart, is just more concerned with the truth, so you inevitably get more.
But why from a comedian? Well, despite the uneasy fraternity (or whatever it should be called) that exists between comedians, it's clear they're a prickly, sensitive, and individualistic lot (for obvious reasons, this conception excludes Carrot Top, any comedian who traffics in "black people drive like this, white people drive like this" jokes, and Andrew Doice Clay). People who are like this tend to have more reactive bullshit detectors, and in fact a lot of comedy, (as the work of stand-up comedians, novelists, filmmakers etc.) and this is particularly clear in Post WWII American comedy, is about bullshit and about the things in our lives that don't make sense. If you watch Jon Stewart, you see how the bullshit really pisses him off in a way it doesn't piss off Paul Begala and especially *ucker Carlson. Those two are hacks- it's just a game for them. Stewart is something else entirely.
I think the key to understanding what makes Stewart so heroic to me is that Stewart would tell those two hacks that they're hurting America, not as rhetoric or part of the debate-game-and-theater but actually mean it. (Which is not to say it wasn't funny, or that it wasn't meant to get a response) Perhaps it seems so heroic because Carlson was such a lazy awful dick. Carlson wanted Stewart to play monkey. Carlson dismissively hectored Stewart for his boring lectures and said he'd be awful to have over for dinner.
What a *ucking crime. You know what, that bullshit just makes me see red. I'm tired of pompous mental defectives like Carlson telling me how important it is that someone be fun to have over for dinner. I'm tired of being told that Bush is the only acceptable choice for president because he'd be great to have over to dinner, or because he'd be great to share a beer with even though he's an allegedly sober alcoholic, or because that smirking corrupt petulant brat of 58 year old is mother*ucking "likeable."
I'm going to have to pull out some vintage warbloggerese. The problem with Carlson, and Candy Crowley, and Paul Begala, and Bill Schneider, and all of those hairdos at CNN and MSNBC and everywhere else on network news, is that each one of them is profoundly unserious. And it's not a mistake.
It's not a mistake that Bill "falafel" O'Reilly worked at Inside Edition or Current Affair or whatever trash tabloid show he worked before he got his job as everyone's favorite professional crybaby. Because the entire industry has become geared around moving product. The hairdos know somewhere in that aerosol-soaked, sawdust encusted heart of theirs that they belong to this money machine and that everything else is secondary.
What's heroic about Jon Stewart, really, is that for Stewart there's something else. At least two something elses. I'd guess the first something else is that it be funny. But the second something else, and I'm just speculating here, is that it isn't the same kind of bullshit that makes Crossfire so painful.

PS. It also came as no shock for me to discover that Bob Somersby of the Daily Howler, who has done perhaps more than any other human to lay bare exactly how corrupt and awful our news media are, is a comedian. There is something about his righteous indignation and his ferocious unwillingness to resign himself to that corruption that mark him as such.