"The Rumble" between Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly was fun and entertaining, although judging from the instant reaction it was a bit of a dud; I guess not too many people were willing to fork over the $5 on a Saturday night.
Basically, both men were very much in character and seemed to have a good time. O'Reilly was his usual smug, overbearing self, providing over-simplified slogans to comfort simple-minded people (the placards were, depending on how you look at it, amusing and pathetic), while Stewart played off of it with his usual wit and underrated knowledge and intelligence.
A couple of things stood out to me, though. For one, Stewart got a couple of things wrong which hurt his argument and prevented him from driving home an important point. First, he mistakenly attributed the entire $11T national debt that existed on 20 January 2009 (which he mistakenly tabulated at $10T, but that's nitpicking) to George W. Bush, when in reality W. only presided over a $6T increase on the $5T debt that he inherited in January 2001. O'Reilly corrected him on this. Stewart was trying to point out that we weren't in deficit when Bush took office, but in doing so falsely claimed that we weren't in debt; that the debt had been "wiped out" by Clinton, which isn't true.
Then he compounded the mistake by agreeing with O'Reilly that Obama ran up the $6T (actually $5T) in additional debt that has accumulated since January 2009. For one thing, Stewart should have made clear that Presidents don't spend, and don't control federal spending, so any statement that "President [X] spent [Y]," or that "President [X] ran up [Y] dollars in debt," is nonsensical. O'Reilly needs and counts on his audience to believe that and to frame it that way, and Stewart made a mistake by going along with it without reframing it properly. But he also failed to point out that very little of the debt accumulated since 2009 is from money borrowed to pay for Obama's programs and initiatives; most of it pays for programs, policies, initiatives, commitments and debts that were already in place when he took office. As has been pointed out here and elsewhere ad nauseam, Obama's own policy initiatives (the Recovery Act, Obamacare, etc.) account for only a fraction of the post-2008 debt; the rest is essentially paying Bush's bills.
The reason this was such a bad mistake, in my view, is that it prevented Stewart from countering one of O'Reilly's simple-minded placards, "Bush Is Gone." The GOP/Fox cohort would have us believe that What Bush Did™ simply doesn't matter anymore; it might have mattered four, three, or even two years ago, but Obama has been in office too long for anything to still be the fault of, or even attributable to, his predecessor. Stewart had an opportunity to make the simple, obvious, and incredibly important point: that What Bush Did™ does still matter, because we are still paying for it.
So, I thought Stewart lost that argument.
However, there was one thing he got absolutely right, in two different contexts. Stewart pointed out, correctly, that the existence, nature and availability of "entitlements," government assistance, social programs, &c. has not fundamentally changed since President Obama took office. Basically, there aren't any new offerings and the existing ones are no easier to take advantage of. O'Reilly's response was a vague, broad allegation that Obama's presence in the White House, and apparently Obama himself, has somehow created a, quote, "mindset" [a word I despise almost as much as "worldview"] in this country that, I guess, makes these things seem more accessible, more desirable, more ubiquitous, or that they're now seen as a "good thing" where they weren't before, or that people now feel they should take advantage of them and "check out" of the work force where they didn't before, or that it's now considered "better" to live on the "government dole," or something like that. It's hard to figure out because he kept using the word "mindset" but didn't really describe it in much particularity. There's just this "mindset" out there that wasn't there before.
The two men made essentially the same types of arguments on the topic of Middle East policy and relations; Stewart talking about actual facts and actual events and actual things that actual people have actually said and done, and O'Reilly presenting a vague, almost hypothetical narrative about a "mindset" that makes things "seem" a certain way to certain categories of imaginary people based on generalized ideas about things that are supposedly, generally "being said" and conveyed by the President and others. Again, the argument is that there is now, since 2009, a "mindset" among some vaguely-defined set of imaginary people, which proves the GOP/Fox cohort's narrative about Obama, even though the actual facts and actual things that have actually happened, taken at face value, "prove" no such thing (neither the narrative nor the "mindset").
This is, as Jon would put it, "the crux of Bullshit Mountain," or what I call the GOP/Fox paracosm. It's not that the facts don't matter; it's that the facts are subordinated to these ideas about a "mindset" that just exists, out there, usually among some large category of imaginary people (any time you talk about people as categories, the people you're talking about are imaginary). It's not about what's actually happening; it's about what some category or categories of people are supposedly thinking, feeling and wanting, which naturally can neither be proven nor disproven since (a.) the people are imaginary and thus cannot be interviewed, (b.) the category is so large that even to the extent the people are real they can't all be interviewed; and (c.) mind-reading is scientifically impossible.
I've noted for some time that Republican politics, by and large, relies heavily on reading the minds of imaginary people. What Jon Stewart might have said to Bill O'Reilly when he was talking about "mindsets" was this: "These are not facts; these are things you want to believe."