Sunday, August 25 – This was a rough
episode for me, on cruises. I’m not a big cruise person, but I’ve done a few
that were half vacation/half professional workshops. Now, of course, it doesn’t
surprise me that cruise ships are
terrible for the environment, workers are criminally underpaid, and companies
do everything they can to maximize profits, but hearing about all of it in
detail was pretty harrowing. “Highlights” included the list of maximum
compensation workers can get for lost
body parts (don’t tell your server
how much his dick is worth,) Carnival still not staffing their pools with
lifeguards despite multiple children drowning, and the maritime-law
sidestepping that allows cruises to all but ignore sexual assaults and only
report deaths that they deem “suspicious.” Also, I loved Hasan calling
Norwegian Cruise Lines (headquarters in Miami, flying the Bahamian flag for
“tax reasons”) the “Rachel Dolezal of cruise lines.”
I
recently commented on how The Daily Show
has had an impressive number of Democratic presidential candidates on as
guests. And it’s not just because there’s such a plethora to start with! So far
(working backwards,) Trevor has interviewed Bill de Blasio, Michael Bennet,
Marriane Williamson, Andrew Yang, Tim Ryan, Eric Swalwell, Kirsten Gillibrand,
Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Jay Inslee, and Kamala Harris, and those are
just the ones who appeared on the show after
announcing their candidacy. There have also been appearances by Cory Booker,
Julián Castro, and Amy Klobuchar in the past year, plus Trevor had Dr. Jill
Biden on the show, in which she talked a little about her husband’s decision to
run for president.
That’s
eleven of the twenty-plus candidates, along with the spouse of another and
three more who came on the show prior to announcing their runs. Again, this
does in part just speak to the sheer volume of Democratic candidates in this
bloated primary – plenty of the candidates who’ve appeared on the show have
been those 1-and-2% pollers looking boost their numbers. But those aren’t the
only ones who’ve come around. Of the ten candidates who qualified for the third
debate, the only ones who Trevor hasn’t
interviewed (yet?) are Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Beto O’Rourke. So the
show has been attracting the heavy hitters as well as the long shots.
This
makes me think back. Trevor took over the show in the fall of 2015, right in
the thick of the 2016 that election cycle. Of course, that election had a
plethora of Republican candidates and
only a few Democrats, so it looked different than the situation now. And a few
low-polling presidential candidates popped up – Chris Christie and Rand Paul
for the Republicans, Martin O’Malley for the Democrats. Ben Carson appeared on
the show sometime after withdrawing from the race, and Bill Clinton made an
appearance shortly before the election. While Hillary Clinton eventually came
on the show, it wasn’t until a year after the election.
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