For those who missed it and/or refuse to cloud your thought patterns with Fox News, Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” was on Bill O’Reilly last night to debate the faux-controversy over the rapper Common visiting the White House. Fox and O’Reilly have been beating the drum for days that the Common visit was a travesty because the poet and rapper once visited with and spoke well of a woman accused of being a cop-killer who fled to Cuba, among other things.
The result of their sit-down: Using a little logic, his Inside Voice and a memory longer than the last news cycle, Stewart laid a some truth on Billo, pointing out that: A) There’s a difference between “celebrating a cop killer” and believing that a person has been wrongly accused. And, B) If you start using the yardstick of “anybody who wrote a sympathetic song about a convicted killer can’t come to the White House,” you’re going to knock almost every great songwriter in American history out of the box — including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and many, many more.