Why not? His show covers just as much news as the evening broadcasts, apparently:

The spectacular value of “The Daily Show” is that it’s an instant B.S. meter. If you’re a public figure and you say or do something B.S.-y, it will not fly on “The Daily Show” unless it flies right into a fan.

Evidently, such in-depth stories make “The Daily Show” as substantive as network newscasts. A new study from Indiana University suggests the Comedy Central show covers substantive news as much as ABC, CBS and NBC do.

Actually, during the 2004 elections, “the proportion of stories per half hour program devoted to the election campaign was greater in ‘The Daily Show,’ ” claims the study, overseen by assistant professor Julia R. Fox.

And here’s where I get to say “I told you so” about all of it being infotainment:

There was a time when such journalism-by-comedy was relegated to the networks’ own late-night talk shows. …

But Letterman and Jay Leno and the rest of the network comics have clung to olden variety-talk show formats, while Stewart has turned “The Daily Show” — now celebrating its 10th year — into the strangest and most effective of evening-news/”Saturday Night Live” hybrids. It’s got civics lessons, political passion and truthiness, all bundled in a mockery that Reynolds and others earn through idiocy.

To veil or not to veil? Jack Straw, Britain’s former foreign minister, says he would prefer it if Muslim women would remove their veils when talking to him as it is a barrier to face-to-face communication. A currect deputy prime minister of Britain disagrees.

Last week, in his editorial published in the Lancashire Evening, Straw asked Muslim women to “take off their veils”. He said that the increasing number of women wearing a veil was concerning, noting it was disturbing to talk to a woman whose face he could not see….

Prescott suggested that Straw’s fears about the women who wear a veil were exaggerated.

“If a woman wants to wear a veil, why shouldn’t she? It’s her choice,” Prescott told the BBC’s Sunday AM program.

Prescot said he would not ask a Muslim woman to remove her veil when she visits his office.

“If somebody comes into my constituency whether they are wearing a school cap, or wearing a turban or wearing dark glasses, I’m not going to ask them to remove it. I think you can communicate with them,” he explained.

The Big Pharaoh doesn’t like Prescott’s comparisons. This is the kind of veil Straw was talking about:

You can definitely see where it would stop communication cold. Moreover, it’s hard to read the wearing of this kind of veil in Merrye Olde England in 2006 as anything but a political statement—and an in-your-face one (no pun intended) at that. And Straw is calling bulllshit on it.

A commenter at the Big Pharaoh’s blog writes:

I wish Muslims around the world realize that the veil is NOT Islamic, but a byproduct of Arabian culture.

Sad that some people regard culture higher than the faith itself.

And this reminded me of another story I read today, about a brave Iranian cleric who is trying to recapture traditional Shi’ism from the grip of what he calls “political religion.”

News filtered out of Iran this Sunday of demonstrations protesting the arrest of supporters of Ayatollah Mohammad Kazemeini Boroujerdi, an Iranian cleric fighting against the “Political Religion” that has dominated his country since Khomeini. Rumors also spread that these demonstrations have become violent with fatalities reported.

Read Michael Ledeen’s take on these events here.

A couple of days ago, another site reported on the events leading up to the confrontation with Boroujerdi and his supporters:

October 6, 2006 (RFE/RL) — A dissident Iranian cleric who advocates the separation of religion and politics, Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi, is accusing officials of persecuting him and his followers. Boroujerdi claims dozens of his supporters have been arrested and taken to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in recent weeks. The ayatollah tells RFE/RL that he has appealed for help from international figures that include the Roman Catholic pope and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana….

The Shi’ite cleric says pressure has increased significantly since the summer, following a gathering he held for his supporters. He claims that thousands of people attended his June 30 religious meeting in Tehran’s Shahid Keshvari stadium.

“About two months and a half ago, there was something similar to a coup d’etat against me — because our last meeting was such that it shook the city and it made the establishment think that if they don’t stop me, then there will be millions of people [supporting me],” Boroujerdi says.

He’s not the only cleric who’s being intimidated and harassed, apparently:

The ayatollah says his belief in the separation of religion from politics and his refusal to support “political religion” have drawn the ire of Iran’s leaders. Iran’s Islamic establishment is based on the principle of “velayat-e faqih,” or the rule of the Islamic jurist.

Reports have emerged in recent years of other clerics and dissidents who have criticized the velayat-e faqih principle being persecuted in Iran.

They include the late Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, an influential Iranian cleric who was placed under house arrest in the 1980s.

“The political establishment forces them to accept its demands and interpret the religion in accordance with the establishment’s needs,” [Shariatmadari's son, who lives in Germany,] says. “Most clerics have realized this, but because of the heavy price of opposition to the regime, most of them do not have the courage to express [that view] publicly. Ayatollah Boroujerdi has been able to express the demand for the separation of religion from politics very openly — to a wide audience and with boldness. This is something that this establishment doesn’t like.”

From stories like these, it is so obvious that well-meaning Western multiculturalists, in the name of tolerance, are backing the forces of reaction in the Islamic world—and, worse, allowing them free passage into our societies under the name of “tolerance.” It’s got to stop. Good for Jack Straw.

(slightly edited to clarify one point)

Footnotes (and/or endnotes): the least sexy but most revealing part of any book. Everyone knows what they’re for—establishing authority—but only a precious few care about them. Are the numbers of even those precious few dwindling?

Based on a string of recently published books, Victor Davis Hanson thinks so.

Most genres don’t require footnotes—the memoir, the essay, the journalistic dispatch. … Check who said what in Cobra II and you find the following: “Interview, former senior military officer”, “Interview, former senior officer”, “Interview, former Centcom planner,” Interview, Pentagon Officials,” “Interview, U.S. State Department Official,” or “notes of a participant.”

When the readers encounter the most controversial and damning of verbatim quotes in Fiasco, they are presented with “said a Bush administration official” or “recalled one officer.” Woodward is ever more derelict, in imagining not just the conversations, but even the thoughts of characters.

I don’t exactly disagree with Hanson, but of course there’s a difference between scholarly works and books of popular non-fiction, which are written and published with the best-seller lists, not posterity, in mind.

There is also a huge difference between intellectual courtesy, which scholars extend to one another by copiously citing their primary sources, and intellectual honesty, which is the coin of the realm in the world of popular nonfiction. It is in that latter quality that Woodward’s State of Denial is so grotesquely lacking, as Hanson makes clear in a follow-up post:

Turn to the endnotes. At each chapter section here at the rear of the book you read, “The information in his chapter comes primarily from background interviews with 10 [sometimes Woodward says “7” or “12, etc.] knowledgeable sources…” But what does that mean other than it is Woodward’s own opinion that they are “knowledgeable” and that because they are anonymous they are usually hostile, and because they are hostile they are most useful to Woodward?

Woodward spins yarns that have the aura of plausibility—gossipy tell-alls that supposedly come from deep inside the halls of power. And he’s not following the rules of scholarship but the law of the jungle in Washington, as Hanson notes:

We know the rules of this new in medio bello genre about Iraq: (1) give your version to the journalist in hopes it becomes the privileged narrative, while attacking enemies who have no chance to get back at you. And if you don’t talk, the likelihood is that someone else will anyway—without attribution and against you; (2) the anonymous source is almost always hostile to the war, but sympathetic to the views of the author. But we are never told whether the disgruntled general’s or former official’s views are typical or unusual among his peers; (3) write a military history in the middle of a war, not merely to offer lessons about the past, but to affect the ongoing course of events themselves—without much worry that usually the entire story of what really went on only emerges with time; (4) don’t use the word “anonymous” or “unidentified” but rather try out “on background,” as in antithesis to “on the record”—as if not naming someone who has terrible things to say about something else in the middle of a war is a normal journalistic practice without ethical implications.

This is more a matter of leaking and political partisanship than a matter of poor scholarship. No one expects—or should expect—that of Woodward, a journalist.

His eventual punishment will be cruel indeed, like the punishment of all the other partisans who write “authoritative” books in the heat of war or political ferment: their so-called “first drafts” of history will be missing when the real histories are written—precisely because they didn’t substantiate their claims in the first place. Their books will not even make it to the level of footnotes to history.
Meanwhile, I note, in Washington all the hypocrites are running for the exits: Woodward, Fareed Zakaria, and Andrew Sullivan*** have all turned. Who’s next?

——

*** this mindless, ludicrous post, from someone who once gave signs of having a first-rate mind, will have to do for now, while I wait for the transcript of the October 8 Chris Matthews Show to appear online. I’ll post it when it does. Apparently, Sullivan, who supported toppling Saddam, no longer believes in the Iraq mission or its imporance in the war on terrorism.
He turned yesterday’s appearance on Matthews’s show into a tired old Bush-bashing mantra. How old? Three years old. I’m paraphrasing:

The war in Iraq was sold to us on a security threat to our very existence. We didn’t have the intel. We trusted the president. And he betrayed our trust.