Posted by Damozel | Entertainment Weekly has the 6 page interview, plus their recreation of that controversial New Yorker cover (Colbert as Michelle; Stewart as Barack).
It's a fascinating interview. Though it's all good all the way through, I suppose my favorite bit is when Colbert offers to absolve Jon Stewart of culpability for reducing the candidates to cartoons:
Many people saw the conventions as little more than a series of talking points.
STEWART: We're all sort of complicit in forcing them to make those narratives in the first place.
COLBERT: You mean us, or the real press?
STEWART: Everything. The whole mechanism of dissecting their every waking moment has created somewhat of a paralysis. We have drained them of their ability to remain human. Because any human moment will be so fiercely dissected and digested and metastasized by the media.
COLBERT: People can be hung by anything they say. We've done it.
STEWART: We've done it too. You can kill people all the time for things that are absolutely human frailties.
COLBERT: You can even manufacture the frailty, and then hang them with it.
STEWART: That's why I don't excuse what I guess you'd call the satiro-industrial complex from culpability.
COLBERT: That's funny: I absolve me. I could absolve you if you want.
STEWART: That's the beauty of having a demagogue on right after your show — he can actually absolve our show, which is incredibly convenient. (EW)
Stewart gave the Congressional Dems a well-deserved reaming for their flaccid, uh, convictions.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you think anything will change if the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress?
JON STEWART: Look at what they promised when they took over Congress. I've never heard such hardcore rhetoric. ''The era of the blank check is over! And we will send a sternly worded memorandum — nonbinding — to somebody at the White House. Not necessarily the inner executive circle, we certainly don't want to offend, but...'' And then they got in and were like, ''Really, you want to eavesdrop? Okay, we'll let this one go. But this is the last blank check! Unless you want another. But let me say this: The next one will not be blank, because we'll just write in the memo line. Can we write in memo? Would you be bothered by that?'' (EW)
And Colbert summed up the inner truth of life under the Bush Administration and what you have to do to get a little attention round here. .
COLBERT: The idea that Lehman Brothers doesn't get any money and AIG does reminds me very much of ''Iran is a mortal enemy because they have not achieved a nuclear weapon. But North Korea is a country we can work with, because they have a nuclear weapon.'' The idea is, Get big or go home. How big can you f--- up? Can you f--- up so bad that you would ruin the world economy? If it's just 15,000 who are out of jobs, no. You have to actually be a global f---up to get any help. (EW)
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