Jon Stewart, Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness

 Mr. Stewart later acknowledged that Mr. Yoo had bested him, which didn’t happen very often. In that sense, the interview was an outlier. But it wasn’t a coincidence. Mr. Stewart had gone in lazy, relying on a caricature, and seemingly unprepared for the thoughtful conservative sitting in his guest chair.

NY Times   "It shows how gifted Jon Stewart is that his best moment happened on someone else’s show. He appeared in 2004 on “Crossfire,” a CNN yelling program, and asked the hosts to take seriously their responsibility to public understanding by having useful conversations instead of shouting matches.

"It was Mr. Stewart’s finest hour. He made an earnest pitch for civility in a place where there really was none. Which makes it too bad that in his 16 years of hosting “The Daily Show,” he never lived up to his own responsibility. His prodigious talents — he was smart and funny, and even more of both when he was mad — perfectly positioned him to purge a particular smugness from our discourse. Instead, he embodied it. I loved watching him, and hated it too. " . . .

"Liberals turn out to be just as prone to their own forms of intolerance, ignorance and bias. But the beliefs are comforting to many. They give their bearers a sense of intellectual and even moral superiority. And they affect behavior. . . . "This sense of superiority is hardly the only cause of our polarized public discourse, but it sure doesn’t help."

And polarized it is, indeed. In fact I feel an intense dislike between both sides that is manifested in many comments and tweets on current events. TD