Jon Stewart's Opening Monologue and Interview with Tim Walz

I have had a very eventful last few days, making blogging more or less the lowest priority item on list of things to do. Tonight I am going to take a bit of a breather. Any Monday Jon Stewart hosts The Daily Show, I am going to watch it, one way or another. Most of the time I simply stream it later. Tonight I wanted to catch it when it aired, and it worked out. We are a couple weeks out from a very consequential election in the US and Jon Stewart has plenty of sharp words for the campaigns. Jon Stewart has plenty of things to say about media coverage of the campaigns, and as he sees it (correctly I might add) the media is largely failing. So too are Trump's political allies at calling him out for his very deranged attempt at campaigning. Jon Stewart sees this and he roasts the spineless SOBs who dissemble whenever Trump's darker, more dictatorial words are presented to them to comment and critique. The absurdity of Trump "working" at a McDonald's is what it is. Trump's odd comments about the late Arnold Palmer's penis are just plain weird. Whether or not they are worthy of outrage is another matter, other than that most other candidates who used their platform time to do something idiotic like that would be called out for it. It's Trump's dark "enemy within" rhetoric that Jon Stewart really wants to focus on as it is truly worthy of outrage, and again, it's unclear that the media are meeting the moment, and GOP elected officials are so spineless that they might as well be reclassified as invertebrates. Here's the video:

 

The big reason for watching was that Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris' running mate, appeared on The Daily Show. It was a fairly friendly interviewing environment, but the good thing about Jon Stewart is that he doesn't just throw softball questions. When Stewart has a guest on, it's to have a fairly deep conversation about some really important issues, events, or ideas. Jon Stewart is clearly not going to let go of the whole Cheney thing - his dig about the importance of gun safety for Vice Presidents made that clear - but he did offer a focused interviewing environment sprinkled with a bit of humor that allowed Tim Walz to talk to a national audience about the Harris/Walz platform and the challenges facing our nation. It's well worth watching:

 

We live in a difficult moment. Thankfully, we have the late night talk show hosts to help us keep our bearings.

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