Just watched the entire unedited interview from earlier this week when John Stewart went on O’Reilly’s show. John has an amazing amount of patience with a lot of childish passive aggressiveness from Bill. He makes good points, and doesn’t get drawn deeply into debates that are designed for him to lose. It was really great to watch him: knows what O’Reilly is all about, obviously, and refuses to take the clumsy bait that O’Reilly puts out there.

Bill spends the time taunting him, hoping to make him mad, so that Bill can yell indignantly at him. He patronizes him, as if Stewart isn’t his intellectual superior. He throws up strawman after strawman, trying to mischaracterize Stewart’s opinions, and each time, Stewart judo-deflected the main force of the idiocy, and went on to characterize his own opinion himself.

It’s crazy. O’Reilly would make me look like a nut, because I’d get way too exasperated with him, and say something overtly rude, after the billionth snotty, faux-civil comment from him, and then he’d get to pretend that I started the fight. It’s clearly what he’s after. Even knowing he’s after that reaction, it’s easy to see how hard it is to not give it.

What’s not so easy to see is how people who watch him can’t see how clumsy and childish he is. He takes everything personally, and turns right around and calls folks who disagree with him thin-skinned. He swaggeringly talks about the macho America he’s part of as he discusses something that he’s afraid of, something that you should be terrified of, too. I don’t get how the people that watch him hold all of those things in their heads: I’m a studly American who bows to no man, but Iran getting a bomb is so terrifying that we should throw our constitution away in dealing with Arabs. I don’t get it.

posted 12:48 am | Comments Off