For almost two years I’ve been telling people that Jon Stewart isn’t funny anymore. Everyone I’ve preached to has vehemently disagreed with me. But after watching his performance on Crossfire last Friday, I think people are finally going to start coming around. (Read the full transcript here.)

Stewart’s problem isn’t that he’s spun off into lefty-land. It’s that all of his Emmy awards have gone to his head–he thinks he’s a serious guy now. When Stewart self-deprecatingly calls The Daily Show Fake News, you can tell that what he really means is “Fake” News.

In a way, this isn’t entirely Stewart’s fault. For some reason, the rest of the media world pushed him into it by doing scads of fawning profiles and including him on panels with Jennings, Brokaw, Rather, and the rest of the silverbacks.

I count Tucker Carlson as a pal, but what bothers me about Stewart’s Crossfire tirade isn’t that he called Tucker a dick–it’s that in doing so, Stewart was about as funny as E.J. Dionne after two cosmopolitans. Or Bill Bennett after a bad night at the Taj.

Memo to Comedy Central executives: Craig Kilborn’s available. Why don’t you get Stewart a job at The Poynter Institute and bring Kilborn back to The Daily Show? I bet it’ll help the ratings.

My quasi-review of John Sperling’s The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America is up at the Los Angeles Times. As someone who’s quite fond of the Democratic party (at least in principle), I’m always bothered by Dem strategists who think that the real path to victory is for the party to be like Howard Dean, only more so.

Fortunately for him, John Kerry hasn’t taken that path. He isn’t campaigning as a New Democrat, exactly, but as a sort of Newer Democrat. Of course, that’s to the extent that he’s campaigning as anything at all–mostly he’s just The Not Bush. (Mind you, that may be enough.)

If Kerry loses, the Sperlings of the world will take it to mean that they were right–that Kerry would have won, had he only run waaaaaay to the left. As a purely strategic matter, this seems like madness.

A Kerry loss should bring this intra-party dispute to a head, as the Clinton wing of the party will finally have to engage the Dean wing. A Kerry win would put the fight off, but sooner or later, mainstream Democrats are going to have to confront the Deaniac fringe and do to them what Republicans did to the Buchananite right in the ’90s.

I’ve come, a little late, to this entry from the much-hyped Noam Scheiber:

“I’ve never thought the chances of John Kerry winning this fall were very good, since it’s become clear these last four years that George W. Bush and his advisers are more cynical and ruthless than pretty much any group of politicos in the country’s history.”

First things first: Anyone who has paid even a little bit of attention to this race since January has known that (a) John Kerry is a much more formidable politician than the conventional wisdom indicates; and (b) George W. Bush has been clearly vulnerable for the last 18 months.

Second, the Bush campaign is the most “cynical and ruthless” group “in the country’s history”? Ever? More ruthless than, say, the Clinton braintrust? More cynical than Team Nixon? I mean, if the people behind Bush are such ruthless, cynical, geniuses, how is that that they blew a double-digit lead in 2000, wasted millions of dollars campaigning in California, lost the popular vote, and only won the election on a fluke?

This is the kid who’s going to be Mickey Kaus’s boss some day?

After little further discussion of the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, two important publications are touching upon the subject. This week’s New Yorker cover shows the American flag with a faint silhouette of the famous image of the hooded prisoner with wires attached to his hands. And today’s Washington Post has an editorial complaining of the absence of the subject from the wide range of issues discussed in the recent debates.

Now that they mention it, it is strange that Kerry hasn’t harped on this most attention-grabbing scandal of the American occupation.

As if the curse wasn’t enough, aren’t the Red Sox tempting fate by announcing that Curt Schilling isn’t going to start Game 5? I mean, before you start thinking about a Game 5, shouldn’t you concentrate on winning Game 3 or 4?

This is the type of mistake that tempts the baseball gods. This is how you get swept.

My review of Team America is up. The basic gist is that I think it’s a funny movie, but not a classic, like South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Still, it’s worth your $9.

The final debate Slant-o-meter is out at Media Tenor. Interestingly, Fox and PBS score the debate similarly. More interestingly, the biggest outlier comes from CBS, who not only scored a Kerry win, but was the only network to have dominantly negative coverage of Bush.

Well surprise, surprise, surprise.

For better and for worse, polls have been a part of our lives for quite some time now. Recently perusing a New York Times “Living History” book, I came across this headline, from November 28, 1939:

Hitler is ‘Greatest’ in Princeton Poll: Freshmen Put Einstein Second and Chamberlain Third

Keep in mind, World War II had been raging for almost three months when the results were published. So make what you will of it, take away any lessons you want, but herewith is the entire New York Times item:

PRINCETON, N.J., Nov. 27–Princeton’s freshmen again have chosen Adolf Hitler as “the greatest living person” in the annual poll of their class conducted by The Daily Princetonian. Ninety-three votes were given to the German Chancellor, as compared with twenty-seven to Albert Einstein in second position and fifteen to Neville Chamberlain in third.

In answer to a criticism, which suggested the use of the word “important” rather than “great” for the poll, The Nassau Daily pointed out editorially that the dictionary defines “great” as “eminent or distinguished by rank, power or moral character.”

The Princeton yearlings gave most votes to President Roosevelt as the greatest living American, with Charles Evans Hughes and Herbert Hoover in second and third positions, respectively. President Roosevelt ranked fifth, behind Mahatma Gandhi, as “the greatest living person.”

A third term for the President, however, was opposed by 368 votes, while only sixty favored it. Most believed he would run but would not be re-elected.

Only 120 Nassau first-year men said they would fight overseas, but 413 would defend this country against invasion. The present war is considered “imperialistic” by 199, “ideological” by only fifty-nine.

The class preferred a Phi Beta Kappa key to a varsity letter in athletics, and thought the chairmanship of the Daily Princetonian was the most desirable campus position.