The right wing furor over the White House's invitation to rapper Common to perform last week got the Jon Stewart vs. Bill O'Reilly treatment, as O'Reilly invited the Daily Show host onto his Fox News program to discuss the issue. Stewart offered his thoughts, as well as his "mad love" for O'Reilly.
In this clip, O'Reilly brings up Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers too!
Last week, Stewart had been mocking conservative —read, Fox News—anger, pointing out that while critics were pointing to Common's lyrics supporting cop killers Joanne Chesimard and Mumia Abu-Jamal, other musicians who have espoused violence against, oh, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (Ted Nugent) are totally fine with the right, prompting him to say, "This two-time Grammy-winning vegetarian's invite to the White House has the Twitterverse very upset and by TV I don't mean people on Twitter, I mean twits, who took the time to ignore Common's entire body of work save for one poem he wrote in 2007 that they appear to misunderstand," and even rap, "The truth that you're stretching leaves me retching."
Last night, Stewart reiterated that point, "Why are you drawing the line at Common? There is a selective outrage machine here at Fox that pettifogs only when it suits the narrative that suits them. This guy is in the crosshairs in a way that he shouldn't be," noting that Bono had been at the White House even though he wrote about Leonard Peltier, who killed two federal agents at Wounded Knee.
Arts Beat says, "Watching Mr. Stewart debate Mr. O’Reilly can be a bit like watch a dictionary argue with a chainsaw (again, we’ll leave you to decide which is which), and while the two hosts never quite arrive at a consensus, they certainly seem to have a good time exchanging rhetorical barbs."
