Jon Stewart, the smug, mugging hero of smarty-pants young liberals who watch The Daily Show, was interviewed by Chris Smith for the cover of the November 3 New York magazine, ostensibly about Stewart's directorial debut Rosewater, about an Iranian Newsweek reporter arrested and tortured after featuring in a Daily Show sketch. But Smith gave Stewart plenty of room to vulgarly bash various Republicans by name, including Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan, while praising Hillary Clinton, defending Obama, and reiterating his call for a year of mandatory national service.
Asked by interviewer Smith if he was "excited about the prospect of Romney 2016," Stewart went on a rant (obscenities were salted throughout the interview).
I am not. My favorite thing about Mitt Romney now is, imagine if the second-string quarterback on a football team got to just go around on all the shows and go, "I'd have f****** nailed that pass." For Romney, it's, "Ebola? There wouldn't even be Ebola if I were president. I’m not sure Africa would still exist."
Former vice-president Dick Cheney was also smeared with an obscenity. As for another presidential prospect, Stewart found Hillary Clinton "competent" and "certainly very bright," but " a little hawkish." No mention of Benghazi, of course.
Stewart opened up a little about NBC's odd idea to make him host of its Sunday morning political show Meet the Press.
First of all, NBC didn't offer anything. They were exploring it in the way of, "Maybe it's time to do something ridiculous." There was definitely a meeting. I spent most of it telling them what a crazy idea I thought it was and kind of going through all of the different reasons why I did not think it was appropriate either for me or for them. That venue feels like an Establishment vehicle. They run on access. There’s a certain symbiosis with politicians....
Smith issued a mild challenge to the unethical taped ambush of Washington Redskins fans by media-coached Indian activists staged by "The Daily Show" in September. He asked Stewart:
The show also did a controversial segment recently about the racism of the name "Washington Redskins." Were you wrong to ambush those fans who were defending the team name?
Stewart was defensive and unrepentant:
I wouldn’t call it an ambush. We don’t lie to people and say we're not The Daily Show or "This won't happen" or things like that. I even said on the show if we found out that these people had been intentionally misled, that segment wouldn’t have aired. That’s not the case. I’ll tell you where there was a real ambush -- when the Native Americans went to the stadium and people said the most vile s*** to them. The ugliness that arose was mind-numbing. So for the story to be these poor people, the Redskins fans, who sat in a room and had to then talk to the Native Americans…I don’t understand the weird defensiveness. We all live in a country built on this very devastating scenario with the people who were already living here. That’s our original Manifest Destiny sin. In some ways, by accepting the flaws, the progress that we’ve made is more impressive.
When Smith placed The Daily Show on the left with MSNBC and Huffington Post, Stewart didn't deny it. Smith asked: "Whether it’s racial or economic or political, people are more than ever locked into information silos. The right has Fox News and Breitbart and Rush. The left has MSNBC and HuffPo and … you. Does it bother you that The Daily Show is preaching to the choir?"
Stewart responded:
No. Any show that’s been on the air for however long a time, the people who are attracted to it are probably the people who like it. Unless they’re hate-watching, which probably also happens.
When Smith asked if Stewart wished The Daily Show "had a bigger red-state audience," he showed his disdain for conservatives:
Do I wish more conservatives liked it? Not really. But you never make a calculation on who you think the audience is or who you want it to be. You make a calculation based on, what do we think is right? What do we think of the torture memos? What do we think of drone strikes? What do we think of the NSA? The thing that people give us s*** for sometimes is that we’re not activists in that sort of ideological way.
Stewart isn't a complete party hack, especially on liberal, feel-good, good-government issues like campaign financing. He admitted to getting frustrated with a dead-end conversation with Rep. Nancy Pelosi on what Democrats were doing t get money out of politics, while being "impressed" with folksy left-wing hero turned Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren.
Stewart used a question about Kentucky's libertarian senator Rand Paul's visit to Ferguson. Missouri, to bash other Republicans.
I do think there is a genuine effort on his part to understand what’s going on. Unfortunately, I think he’s slightly disingenuous when it comes to claiming he really doesn’t understand. Does he listen to the Republican caucus? Has he heard the things they say?
As for Sen. Ted Cruz, he "appears to have been bitten by a Machiavellian spider. That dude is distilled ambition. It’s all calculated."
Not even Northeastern Republicans like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whom Smith damned with faint praise as "more moderate than some Republicans in the 2016 field" (and whom Stewart recently called "a d**k") met with Stewart's approval:
....I don't particularly appreciate the way he's governed the state, so it's very difficult for me to say I'd like to see him go national -- "Shouldn't everybody suffer from this?"
Asked if Obama was "unappreciated" or just a "failure," Stewart instead blamed Congress in his pseudo-clever "comedic" way.
...we have a Congress that continues to say we need to build a double fence along the Mexican border to make sure that Isis doesn’t carry Ebola over the Rio Grande, but they won't come back from recess to talk about it and put themselves on record. That’s just blatant cowardice and blatant disregard for their own rhetoric.
When asked point blank by Smith, "Do you think there should be a draft?" Stewart again called for one year of mandatory national service, an idea many liberals would call oppressively right-wing, even fascist if the idea came from any other political personality.
I do. I absolutely do. I’ve watched military families suffer in a way that is unconscionable considering the demands that we have placed on them over this ten-year period. When I say there should be a draft, I also think it should be noncompulsory military. There should be a draft where every young person has to do one year of something -- military, public works -- something so that we all feel invested in the same game, because that’s the part that we’ve lost.
Stewart obscenely mocked expected Republican election gains tomorrow:
They’ve spent six years basically c***-blocking. Now they will be on the hook. So what do you do? Do you go Sam Brownback and ruin Kansas -- enact all of the crazy stuff you’ve been talking about and then watch everything go to s***?
