Whoa

Let me just say, if you happened to miss it as I almost did, find some way to watch the Daily Show's coverage of the State of the Union that aired last night. As I wept with laughter and was filled with this strange feeling of relief, I had an epiphany about why Jon Stewart is so much more than a funny SNL-type political diversion. The jokes that he makes on that show are the obvious things that everyone has been saying to their coworkers and their friends and thinking about in their head all day, but no one on television actually says them. The feeling of relief comes from realizing that just maybe the alternate universe you were living in when you watched the straight faced newscasters on CNN isn't so unpermeable to reason. For everyone who decries the 'coarsening of our politics' just look at the wide gulf between the Daily Show's no-nonsense take on the State of the Union and the tyranny of artificial civility that makes these stories invisible to the 'mainstream' press corps.