John Stewart Gets Tough
Tonight, Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican party, appeared on the Daily Show after two skits making fun of the Republican Convention that will begin in New York City next week.
As he sat down, Stewart told him that John Kerry had been on the show the night before and asked where Gillespie's guy was. "Does he hate young people?" asked John Steward. He started to cite the Pew poll that reveals his show to be a primary source of information for my demographic but contorted the citation into a joke. "1 in 10 young people can make a bong out of an apple."
"Well those aren't our voters," replied an increasingly red faced Gillespie.
To change the subject, Gillespie started talking about a "documentary" that he just "made" about John Kerry on the war in Iraq in his own words.
Stewart quickly interrupted, "you're not really going to bring up Iraq are you."
"I see where you're going with this.... Kerry voted for the war and missed committee meeting but your guy took us there!"
As John Stewart would say, wha?
Watching this incredible performance I was dumbstruck. Will a Republican ever again come on the show? The interview became increasingly tense but Stewart kept the zingers flying.
What makes this interview so shocking is that Stewart's questions are not that radical. He merely held the leader of the dominant party accountable for his "parsing." In this time of media impotence, real questions appear truly shocking.
2 Comments
Leave a comment
Who is this guy?
Funny that he threw softballs at Kerry when he had him on. I think Ed was just sick of the liberal bias in the "Daily Show". Yes, it's a mock news show, but Jon Stewart has always been anti-Republican.
It seems reasonable for the Daily Show to be "anti-republican" - its always been a liberal show and the current republican party, rather than moving towards the center, is moving rapidly to the fringe and courting the conservative christian vote. But it does expose a general problem in politics - we can't have intelligent discussions about philosophies and issues. We can't lay our views and the table, discuss the distinctions, and then debate which view is best for the nation. Rather, we've become solidified into parties (always have been I suppose). All the subtleties of our political beliefs are approximated by a binary "red or blue" choice, and once that choice is made, or assumed, all the attributes of the party candidate are applied to us, forcing us to defend things we don't necessarily agree with, and to attack actions that we may think right. How different is this from the federalist/republican dichotomy at the start of our republic, where the parties could not discuss because each felt that the other was a traitor to the ideals of the revolution?