Jon Stewart has regrets about his Donald Rumsfeld interview

Stewart says when he interviewed Rumsfeld, the SecDef had recently published a book, which Stewart had spent late nights cramming in order to develop a line of attack against him. “I worked out a logic trap,” says Stewart. “It was elaborate.” He continues, “Like, one minute into it, I’m like, ‘When you guys were selling the war…’ And he’s like, ‘Well, making the case.’ I go ‘Selling.’ ‘Making the case.’ ‘Well, you only told the good parts, so that’s selling, not making the—’ ‘Making the case.’ And I, stupidly, was like, no wait, that’s not my opening, let me go into my trap. But the truth is, that whole interview lived in the space between selling and making a case. That’s where the whole fucking thing was. I was so in my head that I let that opening slip and I did not, to my feeling, have a satisfying encounter with him. It tortured me. Like, literally, couldn’t sleep. And I realized… I lost more sleep over that interview than he lost over the entire war.”

But it gets worse. Stewart says that after the interview, that “motherfucker” sent him a note reading, “Jon, really enjoyed the interview. I wish I had known you when we were younger. I bet we would have been friends.” Stewart likens the note to a knife, saying that Rumsfeld “knew what I was trying.”