Isikoff on The Daily Show: “Some people have pointed out Joe Wilson only has one wife”

“The Daily Show” continues to be a must-watch. Why? Because Jon Stewart has the clean-up advantage, where he can take the day’s Zeitgeist and distill it into the message he wants to send. And make no mistake, he wants to send a message. Somewhere along the way it looks like Stewart got inspired – the exchange with Bernard Goldberg best shows that, where he stayed stubbornly on point (that Goldberg went after the wrong people, and lets the the people with real power (cough certain members of the Right cough) get off scot free). The fact that Stewart aired the full exchange with Goldberg, pre-empting a pretaped sure-to-get-laughs segment centered on the words “vaginal cream,” says something about what he wants to do with his platform. He has the audience, he’s prepared to use it. Perhaps that’s what the new set means; no couch for you, don’t get too comfortable, I’m asking the questions here.

Of course he’s still Jon Stewart and it’s still comedy, but this is the impression I get, even with a friendly interview like last night’s exchange with Newsweek‘s Michael Isikoff. His warm-up last night was great, skewering the Senate’s vote to continue distributing homeland security funds equally among the states: “Bad news for, I don’t know, HERE. But good news for smaller states like Wyoming which has only one high-risk target: popular tourist attraction “The world’s largest pile of homeland Security Money.” Sarah Vowell, I’d consider that a shout-out. At least.) After pretending not to know what a Muggle was (oh Jon, you pre-ordered your Harry Potter from Amazon like the rest of us. SO EXCITED!) and rocking some China skate-shred action, the interview was on.

I have to say, Isikoff was great. I’d last seen him on TV after the Koran crisis, and let’s just say he seemed way more relaxed now. Oh, dishes are delicious served cold. He came walkin’ all cool, hands in his pockets, and even though it was all business at the new desk, he got his points – and his punchlines – in adroitly (unlike the canned one-liners Goldberg had tried). His main point: “It all leads back to the question of whether Pat Fitzgerald has a case or not.” And it better be a good one, Isikoff says, because journalists were going to jail over this and it better not be ‘for some rinky dink case.’ As always, those blank eight pages hang in the air.

Stewart gets quickly to his point, where he stays:

It seems to me that whether or not this is a crime is a moot point. It seems to me that whether or not what Karl Rove was doing is a moot point. What seems like the real issue to this is simple: when it first came out that her name was released and people started wondering, ‘was that a leak of a CIA operative?’ the White House pretended they didn’t know anything about it. And Karl Rove pretended he didn’t know anything about it. To me that is so far, the only issue.

A reader made the point yesterday that the real opposition party was the media. This is a case in point, a tactic pulled from the Karl Rove handbook: find the big, damning issue in the morass, and stay there.

Interestingly, Stewart isn’t drum-beating for absolute press freedom; he doesn’t want the scumbags who use anonymity to smear political opponents to be protected, asking “has the press corps been reduced so greatly that now all they have to stand on is ‘I don’t want to lose access to the White House completely, even if all they’re spreading is gossip and innuendo?’” Isikoff: “Well, I’d like to answer that quesion, but I’d like to do it off the record.”

Perfect timing, and a great closing note for Isikoff. The interview is over but not before Stewart sneaks in his point again: “Just the fact that they’ve played this game of cat and mouse strikes me as enough to say bye-bye.”

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