I usually skip the celebrity interview segments on The Daily Show, but when Dennis Miller oozed out onto the floor last week, I found that I was curious to see what the weary old fudd was like in these hard days for the Bush hardcore. Part of it was the way Jon Stewart quietly uttered his name in the show's opening moments, as if worried that, given the opportunity to react, the crowd might boo, the way they did when John Bolton took a few moments away from running the International Society of Evil to drop by and explain that he didn't mind working for the most unpopular president of modern times because, hey, back in the sixties he was a Goldwater supporter. (He was? And now he supports Bush? Does he think that Bush and Goldwater have anything in common? I wish I could use one of my three wishes to bring Goldwater back from the dead just long enough to let him have three minutes to share his thoughts on the current administration with the nearest microphone.) I guess Stewart feels some kind of professional brotherhood with Miller, who he called "a very funny comedian," even though "funny" is simply inaccurate and even "comedian" is pushing it. I've never liked Miller, just as I've never really liked Christopher Hitchens, though I do think that Hitchens wanted to be a journalist, whereas Miller is a guy who'd have been happy hosting a game show or being a weatherman, so long as it got him some money and attention. Instead, he made it onto Saturday Night Live and was the first performer there to be the official "Weekend Update" guy who didn't generally appear in other sketches, a distinction that is a tribute to his one-note quality as a personality. In some of his book reviews, Hitchens actually managed to achieve competence; Miller, whether on SNL or hosting a failed talk show or failing on Monday Night Football or "starring" in a movie spin-off from the played-out Tales from the Crypt TV show, is just a stiff, tight-assed dude with a geeky sophomore's knack for stringing cultural references together. Even his most distinctively irritating quality--the way he laughs at his own jokes even as he's spewing them, to tip the audience off that the sentences he's speaking are indeed supposed to be jokes--wasn't an original affectation; Eddie Murphy did it to let audiences at the Beverly Hills Cops movies know that the shootouts and explostions that had originally been written with Sylvester Stallone in mind were now supposed to be funny, just because Murphy was now the trigger-happy badass at the center of them. But at least Murphy knew that it would be better for his career, after he'd cooled off considerably, to stop tittering and actually tell some real jokes.

So as I say, I'm predisposed not to be crazy about the guy. My impression that he looked deflated should probably be taken with that in mind. Still, I thought that it was interesting that, with Stewart trying to help him out by presenting him as a real comedian instead of a Limbaugh-like partisan mouthpiece, Miller couldn't help himself: the first thing he did when he sat down in the guest's chair was to tell Stewart that he "appreciated" him for having given "equal time" that night by making some jokes about the Democrats. Miller seemed to think that it was an unusual thing and that maybe Stewart had done it out of respect for Miller being there to keep him honest. He didn't seem to grasp that Stewart, like most comedians, will pick on anybody if they seem to be asking for it. In the same era that Miller has been remaking himself as, in his words, "a Rat Pack of one" for George Bush, Jr., The Daily Show and South Park have established themselves as satirical institutions. The former is regularly identified as somewhat liberal and the latter has its own cult of self-styled "South Park conservatives," but if you actually look at the shows themselves, both have been all over the map in terms of their targets. You can't accuse them of consistently shilling for one side or the other; if they did, they'd be too predictable to be funny, in the way that Rush L:imbaugh, for all that you hear about his supposed wit, is finally too predictable to be really funny. (That's why, when Limbaugh makes a noise that's heard outside his church of the already converted, it's not because he's done something especially funny, it's because, as when he mocked Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms, he's gone completely beyond the pale.)

Some of us grow up with a romantic attitude about both comics and reporters, because they're supposed to be the ones who know the score and tell the truth. In an age where people use stand-up stages as platforms for getting their own situation comedies and Washington journalists see themselves as validating their own high salaries and speaking fees according to how much cozy "access" they enjoy with the powerful, that might seem like a preposterous notion, but some dreams die hard. If both Hitchens, the self-styled hard-scrapping opinion writer, and Miller, the professional wiseass, have seemed even harder to take than usual in their Bush-era incarnations, it's because, by linking their wagons to Bush's star when he was riding high, they seem to have betrayed the roles they'd chosen for themselves. I'm not saying that it's inconceivable that someone could have honestly supported Bush around the time of the start of the Iraq War and remained smart and funny about it, but both these guys threw down the gauntlet and basically declared that they would stand by Junior through thick and thin, to the bitter end, no matter what. I don't doubt that opportunism had something to do with it, and abject quaking fear in the wake of 9/11, though I suspect that they both also recognized Bush as some kind of soul mate. (What they probably lacked the self-knowledge to see was the real basis for their seeing themselves in him. Like Bush, both Miller and Hitchens have thick, unexamined bullying streaks that have really blossomed in these times.) What I'll bet they didn't realize was just how thin things could get for a Bush loyalist as the bitter end arrived on schedule. Neither can just turn on Bush now; their declarations of eternal fealty are too well-documented, as are their most bilious denunciations of anyone who's ever had the temerity to doubt the greatness of our mighty war president. (Hitchens, who, like Dwight Shrute, Rocky Balboa, and that potted plant that's wilting on my fire escape, is much smarter than Miller, has been showing signs since Katrina that he'd like to tiptoe away from his circa-2004 estimations of Bush's infallibility, but he can't quite do it; in the end, he agrees with Bush that any criticism of Bush amounts to criticism of the war, and Hitchens will never tolerate any criticism of or even any doubts about the war.)

What makes it sad is that these are such rich times for crusading opinion journalists and professional wiseasses, and Miller and Hitchens have cut themselves off from getting a piece of the action. The president of the United States is a moron, he's heading for a constitutional crisis in order to hang onto an Attorney General who is, almost unimaginable as it is, an even bigger moron, the White House is sinking under the weight of its hypocrisy and venality, and poor Dennis Miller is stuck there sitting next to Jon Stewart with nothing he can say but, boy, that Harry Reid's a stiff, huh? And don't get me started on global warming--what a hoax, right? Miller was never going to be the next Lenny Bruce, but as savvy as he once seemed to be--given his level of talent and likability, it's a major feat that he even had a career--I don't think anyone ever expected him to turn out to be the next Westbrook Pegler. (There's a reference for you. If it means nothing to you, don't bother googling it, just take that as the point and move on.) I imagine Miller, around the time of the 2004 elections, catching sight of people telling the truth about Bush and the war on late night TV and smirking as he thought to himself, what losers! But aspiring wiseasses should take him as the cautionary example that he is. In the end, the truth tellers have the most fun.

[cross-posted at The Phil Nugent Experience]