Just a heads up. This could be interesting.
Wow, Ted Kennedy on DS and Ralph Nader on Colbert.
Please return with a synopsis for the uncabled among us.
I will try to. It is on at 11pm EST. 10pm now. If I am awake enough, I will post about it. If not **Marley23 ** is usually very good about posting to a Daily Show thread.
Jim
How many posts until someone makes a stupid Chappaquiddick reference?
Oh, I don’t think anyone here would sink so low.
I have to say, that was a really bad interview. I think Jon asked three questions, and Kennedy just went on and on and on after each one, talking about things Jon hadn’t even brought up. In a way I guess you have to admire his bloviating skills, but it was annoying and Jon should have taken a firmer hand with him. Twice, Jon tried to interrupt and ask something to the effect of “Don’t Democrats share some of the blame for Iraq since they voted for it?” The first time, he stopped when Kennedy kept talking, and the second time, he almost got the whole question out, and the Senator talked over the whole thing. Everybody knows where Jon falls politically, but he should have given him much less respect. So in my view, the interview sank like… I don’t know, a car in a river.
The first segments were really funny, though.
Did I mishear Kennedy say the Democrats were the party that ended the Vietnam War? I thought the war greatly escalated under Dem presidents Kennedy and Johnson and only ended with Nixon (though admittedly he escalated it himself) and Ford.
Maybe he was talking about the generation or something, but yeah, I think he did say that.
Yeah, that caused my jaw to drop too. I couldn’t believe he said that!
I sat there slackjawed and stunned when he said that, my wife who is far less political, even said, “but I thought Nixon ended the war?”
Ted is a terrible interview. He blathers and steps on the host, he acted like he was making speeches. McCain, Dean, Guiliani, Clinton, Dole & Edwards have all done far better jobs. Ted was pretty bad.
I fell asleep before Nader was on the Colbert Report, I’ll have to catch it tonight.
Jim
Ah well. I’d heard Kennedy was a lot sharper lately. Apparently not so much. He hasn’t really had much of anything to say in the past 20-25 years. I assume he at least had his pants on?
Pants on, but he seemed to completely lack any concept of how the interview format worked on the Daily Show. Most Politicians seem to have at least a working knowledge of the show before they ventured on. He looked like a clueless blowhard.
Jim
Well, Kennedy always looks like a clueless blowhard. I don’t have cable, so I’m getting it through iTunes, and I can’t decide if I’m going to watch it or not.
“Nixon ended the war” is a great sound bite, but for old anti-war folks like me it makes our teeth grind.
Kenendy got us started, and Johnson escalated it, but by the end of Johnson’s 1st (elected) term the Democratic party was becoming increasingly anti-war. Johnson decided not to run when the anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy made a surprisingly strong showing in the primaries. Humphrey eventually won the Democratic nomination, but while he was not as strongly anti-war as McCarthy those who were against the war and wanted to get out as soon as possible voted for him while the pro-war “stay the course” folks supported Nixon.
The number of american soldiers killed under kennedy was less than 200, under Johnson it was about 38,000, and under Nixon it was about the same. Nixon was under strong pressure from liberals and a hostile democratically controlled congress to end the war, while conservatives generally wanted to stay and “win”.
McGovern ran against Nixon in 1972 on an anti-war platform and was soundly defeated. Once again, the pro-war “stay the course” folks supported Nixon.
Oblivious bigheaded blowhard that he is, Kennedy was big-picture right about Viet Nam. Nixon did not act in a vacuum: the pressures he succumbed to in pulling out of Viet Nam were largely from the left.
I thought he was sharp, but it’s a matter of interpretation: I took his speechifying (which was coherent, just generally irrelevant) as a defense mechanism to stop a sympathetic host from asking any tough questions. He didn’t even pause when Jon tried to interrupt him, so in my view it worked like it was supposed to.
He was already sitting at the desk when they came back from commercial, so who can say? :eek:
It seemed Kennedy was doing what everyone says Dems should do- stay on message, don’t let them throw poo at you and talk about your strengths. When politicians go on the Daily Show it’s because they want to project a particular message. Usually that message is "I’m not the insane idealogue I pretend to be in the Red states to whore votes 
". His was “if it wasn’t for old time Dems and our Medicare and SS, you’d have to pay out of your own pockets to support your geezer parents, and don’t you forget it, you young whippersnapers!”
He seems to have lost about a fourth-grader’s worth of girth, although none of it in the face. He must go to the same dietician as Karl Rove.
I thought he did okay. The spiels he went into were at least pertinent to Jon’s questions, and it looked like he tried to stop talking so Jon could respond.
I liked that he was brought up short when Jon made the comment “But when you’re the one who broke the leg, don’t you owe them a crutch?” (or something like that) – referring to the US getting out of Iraq so they could stand on their own two feet.