Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I was able to watch Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire. I'm glad of it, because it contained a lot of information not contained in the transcript.

And I have to say, it's really kind of pathetic to have your ass handed to you on your own show by a comedian who is very probably stoned to the gills, with your live studio audience laughing and applauding him while he does it.

And yet, his criticism of them went right over their heads. They are partisan hacks with no regard for the truth. Take Tucker Carlson, for example, who consistently characterizes John Edwards as "a personal-injury lawyer who specializes in jacuzzi cases." He's said this over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Several times, he's been corrected, either by guests or by his centrist co-hosts who represent the "left", that it was a single case involving a girl who was trapped by drain suction in a public wading pool; before the suction pump could be turned off, she had been disembowled.

And yet, despite being corrected — and, in one case, after being corrected, responding, "Oh, I know, I've heard that, yes" — he has continued to mischaracterize a single lawsuit involving a public wading pool as "a career of jacuzzi cases". Which shows that he's either a complete moron who can't tell the difference between "one" and "many" or "jacuzzi" and "public wading pool", or he's deliberately mischaracterizing Edwards' case history in order to cast doubt on the candidate's character. I don't know whether or not Tucker Carlson considers himself a journalist, but if he does, apparently they don't teach things like "obligation to the truth" in journalism school any more.

And Stewart was right that Crossfire — and the scores of other programs like it — are theater rather than debate shows. They rarely put on rational guests who debate issues logically and without rancor. They get extremists who frequently resort to ad-hominem attacks, and who apparently consider lungpower an acceptable substitute for a reasoned argument. It's more like Jerry Springer than an actual debate.

I think the most annoying bit was that they kept trying to get Jon Stewart to "be funny", pegging him as just a comedian rather than someone who might actually have salient opinions. Well, that and the fact that Carlson kept trying to cast aspersions on Stewart for having a leaning towards one side of the political spectrum when the whole point of Crossfire is that the hosts unapologetically hold political leanings.

I'm impressed that Jon Stewart had the balls — and the ability — to go on a show like that and control it from start to finish, and say the things that really should be said (knowing it would probably make it the last time he'd be asked onto a show like that). I only wish it had been Robert Novak as the host on the right, so Stewart could have asked why Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to divulge the sources of an unpublished followup story on Novak's outing of Valerie Plame, but Novak is still walking around a free man.