Last night Larry King hosted "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart in advance of Sunday's Oscars, which he will be hosting for the second time. The conversation lasted the full hour and covered a wide range of topics. Here are a few excerpts — find his take on John McCain's alleged "ethical challenges" as broken by today's New York Times here, which he called "unfortunate" and said had "an awfully tired and dusty feel." (Stewart hadn't read the piece). Here are a few more pulls from the transcript:
On Mike Huckabee:
STEWART: Love him. So entertaining, and then every now and again, you will hear him give a speech and you go, oh. It's literally like you meet him, he's a charming guy and then you'll be watching him talk to the base and he's like, then Jesus removed the ketchup stain from my shirt. And you are like -- oh. Ugh.
On Bill Clinton:
STEWART: I love when he defends her vehemently like, how dare you humiliate my wife? That's my job. Don't take that from me. That has not been outsourced. It's just a very strange thing. You know, look, they have a bond, but he is -- unfortunately he is fighting for his legacy, too. I mean, the one thing you find, it seems, that's universal about ex-presidents is they spend their remaining years on Earth, except for Gerald Ford, who seemed to be un-neurotic about it, they spend their remaining years like Colonel Kurtz, in a shadowed room going, they were wrong about me, the things they said. I was a great president. I was in the top quintile.
On Romney:
I don't know if you saw Mitt Romney's concession speech to CPAC.
KING: Yes.
STEWART: I've never heard anything like it. This is Mitt Romney, who by the way, is that guy a Pixar character? He looks like an alien pod created him to be a president. Like, somehow it found a handsome guy and stuck an ear wig in to his ear and it ate away his brain and then they just moved it with a remote control on his --
KING: What did he say again?
STEWART: I mean no offense by that.
KING: I know. No.
STEWART: He said that he was getting out of his campaign because in a time of war, he just couldn't tear his party apart, because he felt that that would help Obama or Clinton. And by doing that, he would be helping surrender to terrorism. And you want to sit back there and go, this is being televised. This is being televised to people who are not necessarily in that room, who may think that's kind of offensive. You are an idiot.
It was like when he said, you know, my five sons are not fighting in Iraq. They're fighting to make this country great by riding around in a Winnebago with Mitt on the side of it. No offense to Mitt Romney.
You know? It is all about the ranking. You're constantly hearing Bush going -- everything has gone wrong in his presidency. He's like, history will be the judge. It is a great way of saying, look, when we're dead, you will see.
On CNN's infamous slogan, famous to everyone except for Alessandra Stanley:
STEWART: So, you know, I think you -- at this point, unfortunately, you have to judge each piece of material. There are very few organizations left that have a credibility savings account that they can draw on anymore -- except, of course, for CNN, that has the best political team on television.
KING: Do you think we have the best political team on television?
STEWART: No, I was told I have to say, that every seven minutes...
(LAUGHTER)
KING: Good (INAUDIBLE)...
STEWART: ...or Wolf Blitzer would come in here and beard me.
On the challenges of the Writer's Strike: