The Daily Show: August 10, 2005

Jon Stewart begins with news about the ongoing war on terror, of course. FOX network hit the country hard with news about how the terrorists are using media to spread hate. Do tell! They elaborate on this shocking new fact by... showing the hateful videos. One video is voice-overed by FOX people with, "It seems to be a training video on making a bomb. Should we even be showing this?" Stewart screams at the camera, "No!" Oh, FOX, you silly, silly network.

Obviously, it's not just the Americans fighting terror because it really is a global effort. Tony Blair recently addressed the UK's own "global row against rustabouts" and said that he's changing the rules of the game. Don't get your hopes up, though... It doesn't mean that cricket's going to get interesting. Blair's speech isn't quite as vicious as it could have been. It's like if he threatened to give them lukewarm water during tea time. The suicide bombers causing all this trouble have been called unhappy youths by the media. It's not as though it's simply young people in a bad mood that are blowing themselves up. "Alienated and disconnected" might work better to describe the characters of The Outsiders (Ponyboy never strapped himself to a bomb, did he?). The way that the media has been explaining also makes the suicide bombers sound like they're doing everything for no reason at all. They have no goal and if you try and stop them, you'll only make things worse.

Senior Disaffected Youth Analyst Rob Corddry throws in his two cents. He doesn't see why the terrorists are being so weak, upset about growing up in two different worlds and feeling conflicted. "Try growing up gay in Boston," he says, before pausing awkwardly. Ooh, too late to take it back, man. Well, anyway, the most important thing to do at this point is to market the frustration. "Do the Dew, Don't Hate the Jew", "Bust an Ollie, Don't Blow Up a Trolley"? Catchy, but I don't know if those will work. Corddry wraps the segment up with a magical air guitar. Excellent.

Iran has just sworn in a new president. At his ceremony in the halls of parliament, where rows and rows of peopel sat -- wait a second. Stewart zooms into the seats and spots Amidala and Jar Jar Binks. Hmm. It does look a bit like the Star Wars Senate set-up. The new president, Mahmoud Ahmandinejad, delivers his speech to the people and it is dubbed over by The Daily Show's super-accurate translator. It sounds like Ahmandinejad doesn't really know names that well because half of the people he's addressing sound like something from the Name Game... Anna bobanna and all that fun stuff. The country's issues with uranium have caught the attentions of Bush, who's still on vacay on his ranch. Stewart seems to be distracted from his speech and peers at the picture. Why does Bush look so good right now?! Back in 2000, he looked like crap and now he looks hot (hey, Stewart said this... not me). Stewart then shows a picture of himself back in 2000, sans the dignified grey hair. Aww, I think he likes nice now but Stewart seems to think otherwise. "I need to become preisdent so I can get some rest!" he cries.

Tonight's guest is John Hockenberry, writer of the new Wired article about blogs of war. He used to work for ABC and is amazed by how much The Daily Show is like a "twisted acid trip version of Dateline". He first explains how he came across war blogs in the first place. Part of his job back at ABC was to sift through the e-mails that they got all the time, often negative ones. He replied back to an e-mail once, calling one guy a loser for not being in the front lines and being only in Kuwait. This particular guy ends up posting Hockenberry's response on his blog which led to a deluge of more negative e-mails (including death threats). Ouch.

Hockenberry and Stewart discuss the clarity and the descriptive style of the blogs. A lot of them are brilliantly written so why aren't they funneled into the mainstream coverage of this war more often? It's probably an even clearer depiction of what's going on over there than what we're being fed by the media because it's the soldiers telling their stories without any filters. Well, this is the first time this has ever happened before during wartime, where soldiers have this ability to freely tell their stories whenever they want, however they want through the Internet. The original intent of having the soldiers have access to such technology was to allow them easy access to family members and keeping in touch. A great example of a war blog is 365 and a Wakeup.

Tomorrow's guest is half of Outkast and a fourth of Four Brothers, Andre Benjamin (or Andrew "Ice Cold" 3000). I'm looking forward to that one. Here it is, your Moment of Zen: Keep a 357 magnum in your waistband for safety at home!