I have watched my quota of Fox News for the year.

So last night we watched the two parts of John Stewarts interview on O'Reilly. Watching anything on Fox is something best not done alone, it's like a team sport. You have to support each other and rally the team on and occasionally dump cold drinks over each other. Also, it's particularly fun to watch anything political with someone you're newly dating, because then the actual talking about things starts. Like, do you vote in local elections? How did you feel about Kerry? Exactly how libertarian are you?

From the start, the Boy said that John Stewart always comes off looking like a loser from these sparring matches, because he looks diminutive. It's true that next to O'Reilly he looks smaller, and a little tired. But I think I only love him more for lack of sweeping gestures and spray tan. After all, Stewarts best interview skill is that he knows what he's fucking talking about, and he doesn't talk about what he doesn't know. O'Reilly kept trying to make the point that it was ridiculous for Stewart to be seen as a serious newsman, to which Stewart kept agreeing. But I think he should be taken seriously as a pundit. I like him more when he's talking seriously about a subject than when he's making Jewish jokes. He's articulate and reasonable and passionate. He always takes the high road in argument, like for instance when Beck was brought up. He could have gone off about so many apeshit things that man's done, but instead his only rebuttal was that Glenn Beck wasn't Everyman because he had a tv show. Short, sweet, dismissive and yet not insulting. O'Reilly, of course, was pretty much himself. His cameramen kept laughing the whole time, which was kind of nice. He DID look diminutive though, and kinda gray at the gills. I think the Fox News makeup artist did it on purpose, OR he wouldn't let them put makeup on him cause it might have been poisoned with narrative minded nanobots.

I wonder why Stewart did the interview in the first place. I imagine it was some sort of trade off agreement for guests that have been on his show, or maybe he just does it for himself, to have a chance to be serious.

Regardless of whether or not its a good thing, I agree Stewart is the Anchor of our generation. There's no one else I can think of who would even begin to qualify. I grew up with Gwen Ifill and Morley Safer, but I'm safely in the minority there, because I come from a weird family. And maybe the point is that within our generation, the news is so utterly ridiculous, it can't be stomached without a filter of incredulity and impotent rage. Also, the Daily Show is sort of like the accompaniment to your daily intake of internet news. You have to be prepared before you watch it, know the back stories, know the headlines, to really appreciate what they choose to comment on. So its News Cliffnotes, but also Destinos? It's not like we really get our news from the Daily Show. More like we get our fortitude to keep reading and watching news from the Daily Show.

In related thoughts, I'm trying to force myself to think of the internet differently. Specifically as not "the internet" cause I feel like I should be living in Seattle about to foreclose on my house every time I say that. It's archaic. It doesn't begin to encompass what the network actually is, and what it does for us, and what it should do for us. I really want us to recognize the extent of how much we changed in the past ten years, how all our internet growing pains resolved themselves into neater more maneageable adult neuroses. But instead it will be forgotten as people push past their iphones and kindles into the brightly lit LED future.

But seriously, fuck the term Social Media.