Stockholm Syndrome

Watching The Daily Show earlier this evening, as Jon Stewart tried to penetrate the carapace of Matt Cooper's self-serving defenses, I kept thinking how the Plame case -- and Cooper's own involvement in it -- encapsulates so thoroughly how we got into this mess. It's been gone over before, obviously, ad nauseam, but it bears reiteration from time to time.

Just as an observation, it occurs to me that while Stewart has become a sharper, more well-rounded interviewer over the years, his one weakness is his strength as a host -- he seems like a genuinely nice guy. He doesn't want to attack his guests and get all Falafel Factor on them, even when they richly deserve it, as Cooper does. And when you have a smug prick like Cooper for a guest, posturing as a First Amendment hero for all he's worth, perhaps a modicum of pointed (if polite) aggression is called for.

Instead, Stewart tried to leaven his initial pursuit of Cooper's own (and the media's overall) enabling of anonymous douchebags habitually using the corporate media as their personal stenographers to transcribe talking points for them -- instead of, say, reporting -- by lamely using the recent mau-mauing of Don Imus as some sort of analogy. The two are not analogous, not at all. Imus was simply the meat thrown in the tank for a periodic feeding frenzy, something to give the veneer of absolution, so that we can tell ourselves how we Did The Right Thing, and then turn right around and find another discount Archie Bunker on the radio or TV.

A much more appropriate comparison would be the WHCD, the boozy, schmoozy circle-jerk over the weekend, featuring a disastrous performance from a puling Rich Little. Jesus, Little even took pains to preface his set by pre-emptively declaring himself not a political satirist, and damned if he wasn't understating the case. This is an increasingly irrelevant ritual involving increasingly irrelevant entities -- co-opted stenographers playing grab-ass with the people they are supposed to be covering aggressively and objectively.

But they hardly bother with the pretense of such things anymore, and the WHCD exemplifies that much more than it symbolizes two worthy adversaries taking a day off to play nice together. It's pathetic; the highlight was Karl Rove -- a guest of the New York Times table, mind you -- getting into it with Sheryl Crow and Laurie David. Does anyone from the Times bother to report anything that Rove might have said at the table afterward, since they apparently beat off at the prospect of printing anonymously sourced quotes? Of course not, but they're more than happy to transcribe an anonymous (naturally) Rove defender, as well as the requisite official talking point from a White House spokesperson. As with Colbert's gaucherie, the Crow-Rove hoo-ha was deemed in bad form, as if one of these fucktards had dropped his cucumber-and-watercress sandwich onto his Edith Wharton novel.

Hell, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Cooper was there as well, pretending to laugh at Rich Little's pathetic trip in the wayback machine and soaking the remaindered strips of his own compromised soul at the open bar. You fool no one, pal, least of all yourself.