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Papa Bear was on The Daily Show last night, and it made for some rich viewing:

Stewart: I keep watching on your network, everyone is saying, Look, this is a center-right country, and he'd better govern that way.

And uh -- How is this a center-right country? Because it seems to me that it is not.

O'Reilly: Look, the problem is you never leave New York City. OK? That's No. 1.

Stewart: I'm a standup comic.

O'Reilly: Yeah, but if you're Jon Stewart, and you go to Alabama you're going to get killed. You can't go where these center-right people are. Because they'll stone you to death.

Hmmm. What passes for the "center right" part of the country for most of us -- say, suburban Milwaukee or rural Montana -- would be unlikely to react violently to a Jon Stewart. They might ignore him or think him rude, but most likely it would be civil and polite.

In fact, I happened to be in Wasilla, Alaska -- Sarah Palin's hometown -- when a crew from The Daily Show was there filming a segment on the town. No one was about to hurl stones at them. In fact, most of them seemed pretty eager to belly up to the table with Jason Jones inside the Mug Shot Saloon to be interviewed on national TV.

Now, I'm sure there are some quarters of the country where a city guy like Stewart might be wise to go well-armed and guarded -- probably some of them in places like Alabama. But to nearly everyone else in the country, these are the far right corners of the nation.

And it's pretty telling that O'Reilly thinks that's the center.

Later on, O'Reilly tells Stewart:

You should get out and meet some of the folks. They're not bad people.

That's true, except for that part about wanting to kill you.

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Jon Stewart talks to Chris Wallace about how his cohorts at Fox are holding up now that their best efforts to keep Obama from getting elected didn't work.

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Jon Stewart on baseball pandering by the candidates and late socialist leader John McCain.

  Jon Stewart recaps Sarah Palin's excruciating interview with Katie Couric.

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Couric: But [Rick Davis] still has a stake in [his lobbying company] so isn't that a conflict of interest?

Palin: [Blank look on face]

Stewart: If you look closely in the reflection of her glasses, I think it says buffering...buffering...buffering... I love this show -- it's like the first season of Lost, only it makes less sense.

  Daily Show Correspondent Wyatt Cenac heads down to south Florida again to conduct a robust focus group on the first presidential debate. Hilarity ensues.

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The woman who gets angry while defending FOX News is too funny.

Woman 1: I watch FOX News and I read magazines and I determine for myself what the truth is.

Woman 2: Yea, she watches FOX...

Woman 1: That's right, FOX is fair and balanced. The others are in the tank for Obama."

Check out Cenac's first focus group sketch below the fold.

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  President Bush's doom and gloom speech about the economy last night reminded Jon Stewart of another speech Bush gave five years ago. Same script, different crisis.

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STEWART: This is so weird, the President standing there with the carpet and the little flaggy things behind him to tell us something really scary. It's not deja vu; that's French. Uhh... I guess I'm having a freedom memory.

BUSH (2003): My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of deicison.

STEWART: That's right -- Iraq! Thank God I'm not having a synapse misfire. He gave this exact same speech five years ago. Which points do we want to hit? First things first...should we be scared...?

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As seen on the I-94 greeting motorists arriving from the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, home to the Republican National Convention. (h/t B&C.com)

We've got a DNC Open Thread going, too...

   Jon Stewart mocks President Bush's lack of short-term memory about when it's OK to invade other countries, as well as McCain's presumptuousness for dispatching "Droopy-Dog and Howdy Doody" (Lieberman and Graham) to Georgia, despite his status as candidate for President.

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Do you guys have any short term memory? Do you have anything? You just said, yeah let's be clear about it, you can't just overthrow a government, occupy a capital, knock over their statues, stack their prisoners, refer to the, refer to the horrific level of civilian casualties as birth pangs of democracy. Of course obviously this situation isn't just the dangerous escalation of once mordent cold war hostilities. It's a chance for our Presidential nominees to get inside the Commander in Chief simulator, and play a little make believe.

Jon Stewart recaps the current situation in Georgia (and the media's ridiculous coverage of it), and calls out President Bush for having the chutzpah to condemn Russia for invading and disrespecting Georgia's sovereignty -- because only reckless bully countries with no disregard for international standards do that kind of stuff.

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Stewart: "It'll be very interesting to see what the United States does here. Our invasion of Iraq somewhat hamstrings our options in Georgia, not just militarily, but also dimplomaticly, and I guess you would say, morally? Let's watch our UN Ambsassador Zalmay Khalilzad dance the delicate dance...

Khalilzad: We want to make sure our Russian colleagues understand that the days of overthrowing leaders by miulityary means...

Stewart: Careful, Khalilza. Steady...steady...

Khalilzad: The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe, those days are gone...

Stewart: Yes! He did it! Those days are gone...in Europe. In the Middle East, it's morning in America.

...albeit in a gentle, politically-correct way.

Investigative journalist Ron Suskind dropped by "The Daily Show" Monday night to talk about the blockbuster revelation in his new book, The Way of the World, in which he was able to confirm through high-ranking CIA sources that the Bush administration ordered US intelligence agencies to fabricate a letter justifying the invasion of Iraq after the original case was revealed to be a fraud.

"The White House is intensely interested because there may be a legality that has Constitutional consequences."

The Daily Show exposed the McCain hypocrisy in full detail. Their recent attack ads against Obama that included Paris Hilton might make the Hiltons a little unhappy since they donated the max to McCain's camp. Attacking their daughter wasn't so nice. Then Stewart takes a look at all the uppity remarks that McCain has made about the McCain Presidency.

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It's another brilliant segment on the election. The GOP knows that anything they float out there will be debated by the media like "Is Obama arrogant?"and they will fail to look at McCain's own arrogant behavior when Obama hasn't actually been arrogant.

After John Ashcroft's testimony last week in which he bobbed and weaved his way around answering every question about what he did during his time in the White House, Jon Stewart and John Oliver compare Bush and his merry band of obfuscators to other American Presidential liars in order to make a historical comparison. Needless to say, the Bush team is in a league of its own.

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Oliver: "I just hope everyone at home appreciates the magnitude of what they're witnessing here. For 7 straight years, this administration has been untouchable in hearings. These guys are the '27 Yankees of dodging questions. The '55 Dodgers of yanking Congress' chain. They're the right stuff of wrong stuff. John, this is once in a generation bullsh*t."

Steart: You really think this admininstration is that good at this?

John: Sure, look, we can quibble at the level of competetition. You can criticize the strength of their opponents -- lets face it, the Democrats have been pathetic. But you still can't help but be impressed at the level of skills on display. I won't be surprised if in years to come they describe these hearings as the 'Immaculate Deception.'"

I truly can't wait to see those jerseys hanging from the rafters.

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Considering Lou Dobbs hates everything "foreign," you know Obama and McCain's respective speeches to The National Council of LaRaza would make his head explode. Obama's appeal for multilingualism reached especially dangerous levels on the "Dobbs-O-Meter."

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"Last week both candidates spent a lot of time wooing Latino Americans by speaking to various Hispanic interest groups. How did they fare? Well, the best way to measure success in wooing the Latino community is by using the 'Dobbs-O-Meter.' The angrier Lou Dobbs gets, the better you're doing"

  ..or Fantasy vs. Reality on the "Strength" of the Economy

For my money, this is when "The Daily Show" is at it's best. Last night, Jon juxtaposed President Bush's rosy (and wholly unrealistic) appraisal of the economy with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's much more sobering (and frightening) Congressional testimony, and noted that President Bush "accidentally" scheduled his press conference for the same time as Bernanke's testimony, certainly not knowing it would overshadow it.

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"One is like a glass-half-full kind of guy and the other is an expert on the economy."

  After a long two-week hiatus -- during which I didn't know what to do with myself from 11pm to midnight -- Jon Stewart and his crack "Daily Show" staff had a lot to catch up on Monday night. Luckily for them, there was no shortage of absurdities to mock, ranging from Phil Gramm's demeaning remarks about American "whiners" to the Viagra/birth control conundrum Carly Fiorina got McCain embroiled in. It's nice to have you back, Jon.

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By the way did you know that while we were gone for two weeks the Presidential race was not suspended? Not only that, they ratcheted the f*#%-ups by releasing the surrogates. As you know only two men can run for President at any one time and obviously they can't be everywhere. They're not Mario Lopez for God's sake. So they have friends, surrogates, meat-puppets if you will, people who can amplify their message across a broad range of media.

Transcript below the fold:

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