Barack Obama's new interview with mouth-breathing fan Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner is most notable for his gooey praise of the "brilliance" of Daily Show host Jon Stewart.
"I don't watch a lot of TV news. I don't watch cable at all," he said, very unconvincingly. "I like The Daily Show, so sometimes if I'm home late at night, I'll catch snippets of that. I think Jon Stewart's brilliant. It's amazing to me the degree to which he's able to cut through a bunch of the nonsense – for young people in particular, where I think he ends up having more credibility than a lot of more conventional news programs do." He also name-checked a blogger:
There are a handful of blogs, Andrew Sullivan’s on the Daily Beast being an example, that combine thoughtful analysis with a sampling of lots of essays that are out there.
Not only was Sullivan a promoter of bizarre conspiracy birther theories about Sarah Palin's son Trig, Sullivan's latest Newsweek cover story offered the Easter message "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus." Don't look now, but Obama's golfing-on-Sundays secularism is showing again. But perhaps Obama is still basking in the glow of Sullivan's absurd Newsweek cover story on Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?
Conservatives would probably roll their eyes the hardest at Obama's dismissing the congressional Republicans as interested only in defeating him and not accomplishing anything: "they have a very ideologically rigid view of how to move this country forward, and a lot of how they approach issues is defined by 'Will this help us defeat the president?' as opposed to 'Will this move the country forward?'"
Get a load of how he thinks the "true conservative" should be more like....Eisenhower??
Frankly, I know that there are good, decent Republicans on Capitol Hill who, in a different environment, would welcome the capacity to work with me. But right now, in an atmosphere in which folks like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist are defining what it means to be a true conservative, they are lying low. My hope is that after this next election, they'll feel a little more liberated to go out and say, "Let's redirect the Republican Party back to those traditions in which a Dwight Eisenhower can build an interstate highway system."
