Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert Truly Are the Funniest, Smartest Men Alive

Way, way, way smarter than me, anyway. Not only was I impressed that Jon Stewart was willing to go head-on with the GOP last night on The Daily Show (in front of Peggy Noonan, no less), but he and fellow news-satirist Stephen Colbert made me laugh so hard I wept while reading the joint interview they did for Entertainment Weekly (hey! I read it online, dammit, so it doesn’t eat my soul quite as much…). This was the capper of the whole thing, for me:

STEWART: We’ve got three financial networks on all day. The bottom falls out of the credit market, and they were all running around. On CNBC I saw a guy talking to eight people in [eight different onscreen] boxes, and they were all like, “I don’t know!” It’d be like if Hurricane Ike hit, and you put on the Weather Channel, and they were yelling, “I don’t know what the f— is going on! I’m getting wet and it’s windy and I don’t know why and it’s making me sad! Maybe the president could come down and put up some sort of windscreen?” By being on 24 hours a day, you begin to not be able to tell what’s salient anymore.

Thank you both for being who you are, guys. America needs you, possibly even more than it needs hope & a new direction & love & everything else. Big thank-you also to Marshall for slapping this up on his lifeisathrill site so I could steal it…