I’m not sure where to start this thread, so this is as good a place as any. 
Jon’s guest on the show was Henry Bonilla (I’m pretty sure that’s who it was… if I’m wrong, someone please correct me). I don’t know what got into him (Jon, that is), but he really let loose on that pubbie representative.
I just kinda sat and watched in awe, as Jon went on his tirade and proceeded to turn Henry’s argument in on itself. Just wow.
LilShieste
I saw that too and I agree. Jon Stewart sort of reeled him in by playing dumb about the “1st and 4th most liberal” polemic against Kerry and Edwards. He let the guy spew a lot of crap and then hit him with the facts. he even caught the dude in a direct lie about whether those rankings were from a single year or over the course of their careers. Good on Stewart.
He went after that guy harder than I’ve ever seen him go after anyone. Looked a little like Russert. Amazing. I wonder if now that the convention is over, Jon is going to get down off of his pseudo-“impartial” fence. He did give some lip to Kerry being long-winded, but he didn’t hit him nearly as hard as he did on the “turning the corner” bit on Bush and how he went after the guest.
As Diogenes says, good on him. Keep challenging that bullshit.
And Bonilla just smiled and laughed through the whole thing. Like somebody’s going to have to tell him when he goes to the office tomorrow that he got schooled by John Stewart, because he didn’t realize it at the time.
Between this and Bill Maher, that’s two conservative congressmen caught in direct lies on non-conservative talk shows in two nights. I wonder who’s listening.
As for Stewart, he has to be careful. If he makes the show too overtly politcal, he’ll lose a good portion of his audience. All he has to do is to keep exposing the lies, and we’ll be fine.
-lv
Perhaps he was angry because his guest politicized baby shoes.
LOL that’s what I was thinking. If I were in Jon’s place at that point I would have thought, “GOP baby shoes? Ok, it’s on biatch.”
I just watched it, and I was in awe. Do you realize how better off this country would be if every interviewer did stuff like this.
And he did not trash the guy - only the lies the guy was spewing. I knew that Steward knew the facts about this, since the NY Times had a good piece on it, and I was just waiting for him to pounce.
The Pubbies learned a lesson tonight. Perhaps you can do well by underestimating the intelligence of the American public, but if you underestimate Jon Stewart’s intelligence, you’re in deep doodoo.
That guy deserves every award he’s nominated for.
I noticed the “GOP” when he brought them out, but to be honest I think Stewart was much angrier at him trying to pull the most Liberal senator crap on him. More than Ted Kennedy? It doesn’t even pass the stink test.
I only saw part of the interview, but when you hear Jon Stewart mentioning facts you’ve heard in the Great Debates Forum… what can you say?
Understand that I’m slightly left of Nelson Mandela, but since when is John Stewart a serious, “hard hitting” journalist who “tears his guests to shreds?” What the fuck is going on here? The man’s a court jester, plain and simple. He’s an incredibly hilarious court jester, but he is what he is. He’s the last person I want to see start getting “serious” and “hard-hitting.”
That’s still what he is. The nice thing about having a really good fool around is they know other fools by sight. 
The point isn’t that he’s a hard-hitting journalist all of a sudden, it’s that he doesn’t tolerate the kind of stupidity other journalists overlook for reasons that befuddle me.
The function of a court jester has historically been to do just that. Barbed wit aimed at manifest absurdity that other courtly types bit their tongues over. The court jester served to speak truth to power. (And provide fart gags, of course.)
If I heard correctly, Bonilla said that he had never seen the show. I can just imagine some equally ill-informed staffer telling him, “Oh, it will be a cake walk. A few jokes, maybe a mock serious question–it’s just a gag show.” I think there’s going to be a mighty unhappy staffer when Bonilla figures out he was had.
Stewart does similar stuff with liberals, by the way. When Franken was on, Stewart played dumb about Franken using research for the class he taught at Columbia (or some big school) to write his latest book. He asked the same sort of questions–“I may be dumb, but I’m not sure I understand. While you were teaching, you found all this stuff and then you did what?” or “So your students, now what did they do, yousaid they did some fact checking?” Franken eventually admits that he got students to do a bunch of the research. The difference is that Franken knew he was being played, and so played along, and he didn’t care about admitting that he had the students do the work.
Why can’t a comedian be serious and hard-hitting?
Stewart has been harsh on people before. The DNC’s chairman, for example, got slammed pretty hard in his previous appearances. Okay, not as badly as this guy but this guy was asking for it.
For those first couple of minutes I thought that it might have been just an interesting interview with some of the opposition to what they had covered last week, but when he started hitting him with the “who said that” routine and going in circles I could see the ambush coming. I’m not even inclined to take it as a result of Stewart’s political leanings; I think if a democrat was going around spewing bad talking points he’d look for a way to let the air out of them, too.
Maybe it’s just my touchy leftist self, but I thought he was pretty harsh on the Dems during the convention. With due cause I suppose, but pretty harsh, nevertheless. I take comfort in that he’ll be just as, if not more, brutal to the Republicans in 5 weeks.
And I agree totaly with the OP. I was hoping Jon was gonna call him on the bullshit. Not just let it slide, as he sometimes does, with a knowing we-both-know-your-lying-but-I’ll-let-it-slide-this-time smirk.
Why is Jon so seemingly alone in his ability to stand up to the bullshitters? Why can’t we beg, borrow or steal an extra set of iron balls for some “real” TV journalists?
I figured someone was going to post a topic on this interview…
Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” does some of the same things. He’ll have a guest on, blowing hot air, then pull out some news article. “In the New York Times in May 2003, you said blah blah blah…” However, I think his guests expect it and come ready with a rebuttal of their own.
John Stewart has the benefit Russert doesn’t of a 200-person audience cheering him on when he takes someone to school. Bonilla seemed to think that he could waltz in, charm the host with a peace offering, then trot out the old argumentum ad nauseum until Stewart let him off the hook. Good for John for not letting him get away with it.
So you’re saying… he’s a Republican? :eek:
Thinking about the interview, it seems that Stewart was giving this guy ample chances to be honest, and pull himself out of the hole. But with the time of the interview expiring, it was clear that he was not going to admit where the information came from, and Stewart lowered the boom. Then he gave Bonilla another chance to be honest, and he lied again. This not being GD I won’t say more, but I hope lots of swing voters were watching.