Jon Stewart did "The Daily Show" last night despite being visibly ill, probably because he couldn't resist the night's topic: George W. Bush's recent media blitz surrounding his new book, "Decision Points." When 2008 came around, it was hard to imagine a "Daily Show" that didn't include "The Decider," and although Stewart's been doing fine without him, it was almost nostalgic to watch him mock Bush again.
The former president has been making many mainstream media appearances to promote the book Stewart lovingly refers to as "If I Did It," including Oprah's show and an extensive interviw with Matt Lauer. Now that Bush has had two years to gain perspective, Stewart wondered what he'd come clean about. How will he explain, say, the "mission accomplished" banner?
Stewart showed just that with an anticlimactic clip of Bush telling Lauer that if he could do it again, he would have said, "Good job men and women. Great mission" instead.
As Stewart pointed out, memoirs are self-serving and allow you to create the narrative you want to be remembered by. But according to Bush's interviews about the book, he wants to be remembered for some very contradictory things.
For instance, he boasted on several interviews that despite what people said about his Presidency, he never compromised principle. Yet, as Stewart showed with a clip from Bush's Lauer interview, he admitted to compromising his principles on the free market system by injecting tax payer's money into the economy.
"So the one principle you did kind of abandon was capitalism," Stewart said.
He then moved on to two more topics that people have wanted Bush to address over the last two years: the legality of water-boarding and his response to Hurricane Katrina. Again, Bush contradicted himself. First he told Lauer that lawyers allowed him to bend the rules on water-boarding to keep America safe, and then he said on "Oprah" that certain laws prevented him from sending troops to New Orleans during Katrina.
After all of that, Stewart couldn't believe that the "most disgusting" part of Bush's presidency, in Bush's opinion, was when Kanye West called him a racist. Luckily, Lauer succeeded in squashing that beef when he acted as a mediater between the jilted former President and the rapper who said he "doesn't care about black people."
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