John Stewart is the MANG!!

[summit]

John Stewart is my new political hero. (Nice Jewish boy too)

I really want to get a downloaded highband vid of that exchange... I couldn't stop laughing or dropping my jaw throughout the entire thing. Thank you folks for finding that stuff!

edit:

Watched the video... you can really see John Stewarts frustration and anger at the partisan asshats.

Was it just the video compression or did John Stewart seem high?

[Svengali]

Jon Stewart needs some sort of medal/recognition for Valorous Service!
Perhaps making him an Honorary Maggot is a fitting Start!
Someone Higher up the Maggot Totem Pole should make the nomination official though, as I is just a lowly one


much thanx to those who found/posted the links to transcripts/video! you know who you are.

[Droopy]

No words, just approval.

[Obstruction]

In-fucking-credible. I read the transcript Evil E put up and was still mesmerized. That shit needs a far wider audience than Crossfire can provide. I'm not one for intraweb chain letters but I'll send that link to ten people fo shoah.

Thanks for posting the link yogachick.

[365wp]

I can host this if somebody has the video.

[gonzo]

i've already sent it to approx 150...

[repeat]

Stewart's ball size > Jamie Pierre's

[dropinskiout]

here's the video. no registration, i'm getting 165KB/sec off of it.

http://www.contemporaryinsanity.org/video/

[kush1]

"(APPLAUSE) CARLSON: Well, I'm just saying, there's no reason for you -- when you have this marvelous opportunity not to be the guy's butt boy, to go ahead and be his butt boy. Come on. It's embarrassing.

STEWART: I was absolutely his butt boy. I was so far -- you would not believe what he ate two weeks ago. "

Now that's a good interview, hahaha

[non grata]

that was way too short. for every hour that i've wasted watching garbage on the Networks, i want to see that complimented with what i have just seen.

thanks for the feed, yogachik & dropin.

[Dantheman]

Damn, when he says to them, "Well that went well." right before it cuts out, fucking awesome.

[Ski Monkey]

That was great.

Here's a link to the torrent. Go to cnet.com or versiontracker.com to download torrent software.

[13]

Tipp, I thought you worked for CNN?

[ulty_guy]

about fukking time someone 'real' put them in their place.

[road trip]

There is nothing more painful than watching a comedian turn self-righteous. Unless of course, the comedian is lashing out at smug and self-serving television-news personalities. Jon Stewart could not resist a last dig at CNN's "Crossfire" during his monologue on Comedy Central on Monday night . "They said I wasn't being funny," the star of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" said, rolling his eyes expressively. "And I said to them: 'I know that. But tomorrow I will go back to being funny," Mr. Stewart said, adding that their show would still be bad, although he used a more vulgar expression.

And that is why his surprise attack on the hosts of CNN's "Crossfire" was so satisfying last Friday. Exchanging his usual goofy teasing for withering contempt, he told Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson that they were partisan hacks and that their pro-wrestling approach to political discourse was "hurting America." (He also used an epithet for the male reproductive organ to describe Mr. Carlson.)

Real anger is as rare on television as real discussion. Presidential candidates no longer address each other directly in debates. Guests on the "Tonight" show or "Oprah" are scripted monologuists who pitch their latest projects and humor the host. It has been decades since talk-show guests conversed with one another, yet there was a time when famous people held long and at times legendarily hostile discussions (Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. on ABC in 1968, Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1980).

Nowadays, live television meltdowns seem to be pathological, not political - Janet Jackson baring a breast during the Super Bowl or Farrah Fawcett babbling incoherently to David Letterman.

The fuming partisan rants on Fox News or "Real Time With Bill Maher" are aimed at the converted. And celebrities, like politicians, stay on message and stick to talking points, which may help explain the popularity of "Celebrity Poker" - it gives viewers a rare, unfiltered glimpse of stars' real personalities as they handle a bad hand or a humiliating bluff.

Mr. Stewart's frankness was a cool, startling, rational version of Senator Zell Miller's loony excoriation ("Get out of my face") to Chris Matthews of MSNBC during the Republican convention.

The transcript of Friday's "Crossfire," and the blog commentary about it, popped up all over the Internet this weekend. Mr. Stewart's Howard Beal (of "Network") outburst stood out because he said what a lot of viewers feel helpless to correct: that news programs, particularly on cable, have become echo chambers for political attacks, amplifying the noise instead of parsing the misinformation. Whether the issue is Swift boat ads or Bill O'Reilly's sexual harassment suit, shows like "Crossfire" or "Hardball" provide gladiator-style infotainment as journalists clownishly seek to amuse or rile viewers, not inform them.

When Mr. Carlson took the offense, charging that Mr. Stewart had no right to complain since he had asked Senator John Kerry softball questions on "The Daily Show," Mr. Stewart looked genuinely appalled. "I didn't realize - and maybe this explains quite a bit - that the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity." When Mr. Carlson continued to argue, Mr. Stewart shut him down hard. "You are on CNN," he said. "The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls."

All late-night talk-show hosts make jokes about politicians. What distinguishes Mr. Stewart from Jay Leno and David Letterman is that the Comedy Central star mocks the entire political process, boring in tightly on the lockstep thinking and complacency of the parties and the media as well as the candidates. More than other television analysts and commentators, he and his writers put a spotlight on the inanities and bland hypocrisies that go mostly unnoticed in the average news cycle.

Mr. Stewart is very funny, but it is the vein of "a plague on both your houses" indignation that has made his show a cult favorite: many younger voters are turning to the "The Daily Show" for their news analysis, and are better served there than on much of what purports to be real news on cable.

And of course it was fun just to see television pundits who think they are part of the same media version of the Algonquin Round Table as Mr. Stewart lose their cool when he tore off the tablecloth and shattered the plates. "Wait,'' Mr. Carlson said querulously. "I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny." Mr. Stewart was funny. And it was at their expense.

[summit]

Thats an awesome article!

Looks like Stewart got trhough to someone in the media at least.

Stewarts comments about crossfire on his monday show were tame compared to what crossfire said about him:

Novak said Stewart was "not funny", "confused" and "not an informed person"

The other guy said Stewart was a "pompous ass"

Some people are DENSE DENSE DENSE

[Tippster]

Tipp, I thought you worked for CNN?

Nope, Reuters.

http://www.reuters.com/news.jhtml

[Benny Profane]

Just an update - bow tie boy is out of work!


CNN Will Cancel 'Crossfire' and Cut Ties to Commentator


By BILL CARTER

Published: January 6, 2005



NN has ended its relationship with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and will shortly cancel its long-running daily political discussion program, "Crossfire," the new president of CNN, Jonathan Klein, said last night.

Mr. Carlson said he had actually quit "Crossfire" last April and had agreed to stay on until his contract expired. He said he had a deal in place for a job as the host of a 9 p.m. nightly talk program on MSNBC, CNN's rival.



One NBC News executive said that no deal had been completed between MSNBC and Mr. Carlson. "Tucker is a great journalist and we are exploring options with him for a 9 p.m. job," said Jeremy Gaines, a spokesman for MSNBC.

"I don't know what CNN is saying," Mr. Carlson said. "But I have no dispute with CNN."

Mr. Klein said the decisions to part company with Mr. Carlson and to end "Crossfire" were not specifically related, because he had decided to drop "Crossfire" regardless of whether Mr. Carlson wanted to stay on.

Mr. Klein said, "We just determined there was not a role here in the way Tucker wanted his career to go. He wanted to host a prime-time show in which he would put on live guests and have spirited debate. That's not the kind of show CNN is going to be doing."

Instead, Mr. Klein said, CNN wants to do "roll-up-your-sleeves storytelling," and he said that was not a role he saw for Mr. Carlson. "There are outlets for the kind of show Tucker wants to do and CNN isn't going to be one of them," he said.

Mr. Klein said he wanted to move CNN away from what he called "head-butting debate shows," which have become the staple of much of all-news television in the prime-time hours, especially at the top-rated Fox News Channel.

"CNN is a different animal," Mr. Klein said. "We report the news. Fox talks about the news. They're very good at what they do and we're very good at what we do."

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at "Crossfire" when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were "hurting America."

Mr. Klein said last night, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise." He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

"Crossfire" may be continued "in small doses" as part of the political coverage on CNN's other programs, Mr. Klein said.

Mr. Klein said he intended to keep CNN's highest-rated program, "Larry King Live," much as it is because Mr. King does not do "head-butting debate" but "personality-oriented television."

The rest of CNN's prime-time lineup will be moving toward reporting the day's events and not discussing them, he said.

Mr. Klein said he had no intention of changing that approach, but he added a caveat. "Not unless the first batch of things we're trying to do don't turn out well," he said.

[lemon boy]

fokkin NICE!

[jibij]

ummm... buh-bye

[summit]

Outstanding!

[Will]

Matt Taibbi does not like Tucker.....

I believe this article does deserve the
-----------------------------------------


BOW TIE ME UP
Tucker Carlson is a dirty weasel, but he's not the real problem.

By Matt Taibbi

CARLSON: We've been hearing all day about this volcano in the Canary Islands that may collapse at some point and send a tsunami toward the East Coast of the United States drowning the Hamptons. Do you consider that a likely scenario, a possible scenario?

SIPKIN: You know, I hate to say things are impossible...I would say that it is not very likely, that if it was possible there's no way of telling whether it's going to happen in 100,000 years—I don't even know what the likelihood is.
—Tucker Carlson, on CNN's Newsnight, interviewing seismologist Stuart Sipkin of the U.S. Geological Survey


Thank you, Tucker, thank you. When this whole tsunami thing happened, that was my first thought, too—hey, what about the Hamptons? Are the Hamptons safe? Now I know.

Tucker Carlson is in the news this week. Rumor has it he is going to take Deborah Norville's nine o'clock slot on MSNBC, providing society with the hyperambitious, polysyllabic segue to Scarborough Country it has been lacking all these years. The move comes amidst reports that the network has scrapped plans for its long-anticipated revival show, Alvin Ailey Presents Michael Savage.

Carlson's move to MSNBC is almost certain to provoke yet another series of articles about the "right-i-zation" of cable news. Liberal outlets everywhere are going to remind us that the Fox network has been crushing its opposition so convincingly that the other networks are now fighting back with moves like this Carlson thing—by trying, in other words, to equal or surpass Fox's partisanship. Weed out the old "neutral" voices, stick in a seemingly open, unapologetic conservative like Carlson, and eventually the entire informational landscape will be dominated by flag-waving dunderheads fighting over the carcass of Alan Colmes. This is the terrifying future we are going to be warned about once again, if Carlson goes GE.

Certainly this is a frightening prospect, but I'm not sure the ascension of Carlson is the right thing to get upset about. Carlson's role in the cable-news world—that absurdist interpretation of Orwell that dominates the shape and speed of the American news cycle—has never been entirely clear. He has never been believable as a hatemongering brownshirt; his political ethnicity is probably closer to traitor than demagogue. You'd know exactly which side of the desert island to search for Carlson, if he were ever to be stranded on one with the Barnard French faculty and the Tuscaloosa chapter of the Klan—he'd be on the left bank, passionately misquoting Baudelaire. The same cannot be said for people like Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, genuinely insecure creeps whose ideal natural habitat is the praise of bigots.

Carlson occupies the same role for conservatives in the media landscape that Colmes does for liberals. Colmes is a pale-faced, paint-by-numbers loser whose only job is to be a believable liberal for people who live in trailers. Carlson is CNN's idea of a conservative. His right-wing ideas come from his changeable, expensive brains instead of his stomach. In the same way that the helpless, ineffectual Colmes is a reassuring image to hardcore conservatives, Carlson puts a soothing face on conservatism for educated East-coast progressives—because even the biggest neo-Marxist wanker from Brown takes one look at Carlson and sees the one man in America he would feel sure of being able to kick the shit out of in a back alley.

That same wanker could probably take Savage or O'Reilly, too, but those guys have supplicants and constituents by the millions who would come rushing to their aid. Not Carlson. In a bar fight, no 35-year-old man with a bow tie has friends. Especially not a smart-aleck closet case like Carlson. You would be hard-pressed to find an American who would not leap to his feet to cheer the sight of Tucker Carlson getting his teeth kicked down an alley, which I suspect is the reason CNN picked him to be their champion of conservatism. He is a patsy and a fraud—the kind of public personality totalitarian regimes used to nurture for years in order to execute for a lack of orthodoxy at some opportune historical moment much later on. That MSNBC hires him thinking they're getting the real thing, a big ticket to red-state ratings, just shows how clueless that network really is.

It's true that Carlson has said and done a lot of inflammatory things over the years. His criminal niches in the conservative pundit world seem to be the bald factual misrepresentation and the suggestively over-enthusiastic gay-bashing joke. He once described cross-dressing as a "Democratic value," and said the following about gay, lesbian and transgender delegates at the DNC: "If you don't find them at least mildly funny, you're probably a Democrat." In yet another break from the grimly onanistic Hannity/Savage aesthetic, Tucker will occasionally come on like a lascivious young sex god, and often seems anxious that the CNN demographic know how much he digs chicks and even—gasp—lesbians. "One area of liberal phenomenon I support is female bi-sexuality, this apparent increased willingness of girls to bring along a friend," he told Elle magazine. Famously, he once also confessed to a sex fantasy about Hillary Clinton; he said she was too wound up and that he could "help her."

More seriously, Carlson has been known to do things like falsely report that Al Gore decided to go campaigning on the day his sister died, and that Republican speakers were booed and hounded by angry activists at Paul Wellstone's memorial service (they were not). But this is academic. You play a conservative pundit on television long enough, and anyone will be able to find a whole pile of objectionable statements in your past. The real significance of Carlson, as the celebrated exchange with Jon Stewart incoherently hinted at, is not what he says about the right, but what he says about television.

Stewart was right to target Crossfire. The Carlson/Paul Begala "debate" show is not only one of the biggest con games in the informational arena, it's the archetypal blueprint for the larger con game of American politics. In the show, the "left" battles the "right," and the segments are structured in such a way that the commentary is bound to outrage virtually every viewer away from one or the other debate participant. Taking sides, the viewer accepts the black-and-white left-right paradigm and focuses exclusively on the two debaters. As a result, he doesn't ask the important question, which is this: If Tucker Carlson represents the right and Paul Begala represents the left, what is the ideology of the tv studio in which they sit? What's the politics of that dull white table upon which their arms rest? Because the unspoken assumption of the show is that the debate is held in a perfectly neutral medium—and this is a false assumption.

Television has its own ideology. No matter who wins the fake debates, it always wins. It is always selling something: not just products, but a whole mountain of cultural assumptions and prejudices that make the population passive, submissive and amenable to buying. One of the biggest of those assumptions is that politics is something neat and theatrical that fits in three eight-minute segments, and can be conducted with a handshake on an unchanging set day after day for decades, by a pair of glib geeks in suits who probably drink espresso together or blow each other after each show.

Real politics isn't a ping-pong game. It's ugly, uncomfortable, deadly serious and inherently bad television. That both Crossfire and our presidential elections are good television ought to tell us something. We're being had by a league of frauds, and whether they play on the right or the left is immaterial.

[AfroMullet]

John Stewart for pres!!! He has what is possibly the greatest show on TV at the moment.

Well, that and Playboy TV.

[My Pet Powder Goat]

Stewart-Colbert still the best show on TV...and the only news I now watch

revived this thread 4 awesome episode tonight's(2/7) episode.

gives Mitt( a vote 4 dems = support terrorism) Romney the biggest "FAH-Q!" I have ever seen him dish out. He Tears Romney a new asshole for his right-wing baiting concession speech....and 4 being a HUGE douchebag


god I love those guys


Tivo it bitches!!! ...or watch one of the 100 reruns of it between now and Mon nite.

[SpinalTap]