Jon Stewart is quickly becoming a hero of mine. Here’s a guy who runs a parody news show and he’s more accurate and effective than most of the press in the country. He’s someone you can believe in. His integrity is beyond question in my view.
Last night his guest was Chris Matthews from MSNBC. The interview was some of the best television possible. Chris is not a favorite of mine. I used to like him but then started noticing very disturbing, partisan elements to his commentary. Then it became impossible to ignore. The guy really hates liberals and doesn’t understand them at all. He can’t fathom how people aren’t impressed with George Bush and anyone who can’t understand that has their own problems.
Anyway, Matthews was on The Daily Show last night to promote a new book. This one was all about how life is like a political campaign and to succeed you need to treat it like that along with all the heartless decisions that get made along the way in a campaign. Stewart had read it beforehand and I’m continually amazed at how many of these books he’s able to read given that he has 4 guests a week and at least 3 of them have books to push.
Matthews asked if Stewart read it (mistake number one) and when Stewart informed him that he had Matthews asked, point-blank, what he thought (mistake number two). Stewart was full of opinions on it and none of them were good. He started by seriously calling it a “recipe for sadness”. Matthews was so caught off-guard by this turn of events that he literally didn’t know how to react. He fumbled over what to say and how to react. He kept trying to find a way to rescue the interview and finally had to resort to phrases like “You’re just impossible”.
Jon Stewart, being the person he is, clearly felt bad about the way it went. Completely out of character for the show Stewart came back from the final commercial and tried to say something nice about the book without compromising his principles.
I’ll be very surprised if Chris Matthews rushes back to the show anytime soon.
