A day before the infamous crossfire appearance, Jon Stewart was on C-span's "America Perspectives" for a one-hour talk. He covers a lot of the same ground (and uses a few jokes that showed up in his show in subsequent weeks) and it's really quite something to see him at work. Here's the stream, pass it on.

He's clearly not entirely comfortable in the role he's playing here. He makes jokes to get away from tough questions -- totally dodged the "where do you get your news from" query -- but he has good answers here on a number of standard critiques. For instance, on the idea that "kids get their news from the Daily Show," his answer is simple: they don't, because if they didn't already understand current events the show wouldn't be funny.

I also think it's very revealing the kinds of questions other people ask him. For instance, the first question from the audience was from an older guy, a dad, who worked at Citigroup, a muslim, and his question was "how do we make peace with the 1.2 billion muslims who want to make peace?"

That's the question he asked Jon Stewart. I begin to see why Jon's so uncomfortable being in the position he's in. Fighting for the Truth (cap-t) is hard, and when you do it in times like these, people fucking up and swarm to you like you came down from heaven. Tough, ugly business.