The Daily Show - Live!

Ok, I started writing this whole thing about Joe the Plumber and the fallout from all that; and the baseball playoffs and how the Red Sox had the big comeback that wasn't, but that it was still a good series and then it struck me - whoa, this is SO last week's post. Give it up!

SO - consider it given up. Moving on to this week.

On Monday (yes yes I know, that's still way behind. Leave me alone.) I went for the first time ever to see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart live and in person. It was very fun, though I have to say I'm not 100% convinced that it's worth the more than two hour wait between the time you show up and the time the show starts. I was with good friends and the weather was good, so it wasn't bad standing around on 11th Avenue, having some coffee and chatting it up with a guy I hadn't seen in a long time, but whoa - if it's cold or rainy, let somebody else have your seat.

That said - it was a very good show. He did a big segment on a notion that I was riffing on a couple of posts ago: the idea that people who aren't in love with the Bush administration are somehow not "Real" Americans, or that we may even be "Anti-America." Which is, to put it politely, bullsh*t.

*Asterisks are extremely polite

But there we had Senior McCain advisor Nancy Pfotenhauer going on about the "Real Virginians, if you will" who live away from the Sodom of Arlington and the Gomorrah of Alexandria, and we had the Candidate who Must Not be Named going on about the pockets of America "or as I like to call it, Real America" where people work hard and vote Republican. And Jon did a rather splendid job of skewering that notion - that those of us in Fake America don't work hard or have beliefs that we hold dear or love our country.

As he so aptly put it: Pfuck all y'all.

And then we got to see viddy of Jason Jones up in Wasilla, AK, where he got the opinion straight from the mouth of Dianne Keller, the current Mayor, that the job is "uniquivocally" good preparation for the office of Vice President of the United States. The good Mayor was then hard pressed to name a task that she is called on to do - AT ALL - beyond attending a staff meeting on Mondays, and writing some checks to pay the city's bills on Thursdays. And we found from a hard working local in a bar that 9/11 was a tremendous crisis to people in Wasilla, and that they had a great patriotic response to it, as opposed to the people who live in Fake America, who weren't as profoundly affected. Fake Americans like New Yorkers.

Take just a moment to wrap your minds around that one, would you please?

[Head. Explodes.]

And the featured guest was author/filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, who made the movie "Why We Fight," and was plugging his new book The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril. Among the many interesting-unto-brilliant things he said was a thrown off comment about how watching The Daily Show is one of the most important ways Americans can spend their time.

That would be Fake Americans, I guess.

I don't know about it being one of the most important ways of spending time (especially when we're talking about that 2 hour wait), but it's a pretty durn good show.

Stay tuned for an exciting and fun post coming up soon, about one of my new favorite monologist/writer/bloggers. And enjoy the Series, even without the Sox or the Cubs or the other Sox or the Dodgers...