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A blogger at Foreign Policy asks if Jon Stewart hurt America when he sounded off on political TV shows like Crossfire five years ago. His reasoning? Crossfire had people on the left and right shouting at each other; now it is gone, and there are just shows where people like Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann yell by themselves. Andrew Sullivan says, “He’s got a point, hasn’t he?”

No. No, he has not. Because we were not, and never have been, limited to a binary choice between these two types of shows. Jon Stewart pointed out that Crossfire did not promote healthy political discourse. Because it didn’t. It does not by any means inevitably follow that shows that were arguably even unhealthier had to succeed it.

Imagine that all day long, you and your friends smoked weed and played video games. And finally your girlfriend got sick of it, yelled at you that you were wasting your life, and kicked them out.

So then you just started drinking cheap whiskey and watching TV all day long, by yourself. Would it really make sense for someone to say to your girlfriend, “Look what you’ve driven him to”? As if you had no other options?

No, that would make no sense. And neither do the people on the Internet, so unfortunately much of the time.