I just watched the full half-hour interview of Jon Stewart on Bill O’Reilly’s show. The first half of it is quite worth watchin:

The best you will ever do in a political argument of this type is get your opponent to admit that you make some good points, just as Jules says to Vincent at the beginning of Pulp Fiction. But this is rare—especially in a public setting. The way I know I’ve won an argument with someone is when their argument keeps getting changed. This is how I know that Stewart beat O’Reilly all to hell. O’Reilly starts out by saying that no one should be allowed to the Whitehouse who has defended a cop killer. Stewart brings up two examples of others who have done so without O’Reilly flying into a rage (most important, Bono who visited Bush Jr. in the Whitehouse), Suddenly, it isn’t about the fact that Common wrote approvingly about someone he claims was wrongly accused of killing a cop; now it is about the fact that Common visited this person in jail. And it goes on like that. If the argument went on long enough, O’Reilly’s entire case would be that Common has a high-carb diet.

O’Reilly is not really what most people think he is. He has a number of liberal positions on gun control and early-term abortion. But these are just the smokescreen of an smart hater. The entire appeal of his show (and most of Faux News) is that it allows angry people something to be angry about. So O’Reilly has these nice beliefs so he can say, “I can’t be pigeonholed.” But the fact remains that his show is only about anger. He could be a socialist and still do his show. Politics doesn’t really matter. What matters is, “Look at this outrage!”