Jon Stewart responded to Saturday's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others by opening Monday night's Daily Show with a non-comedic monologue addressing the violence.
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Stewart inspired everyone from moderate to progressive during his closing speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity this fall. Then, Stewart celebrated the idea of turning down the volume in a political climate steeped with vitriol. On his first broadcast back after the Tucson tragedy, Jon Stewart cautioned against blaming political rhetoric for the actions of a madman saying, at one point: "You can't outsmart crazy...Crazy always seems to find a way. It always has."
Rally to Restore Sanity - Jon Stewart's closing speech (full text)
First photo of Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner in custody released
Sarah Palin's website had a photo of target, crosshairs over Gabrielle Giffords
"So here we are again stunned by a tragedy. We have been visited by this demon before. Our hearts go out to those that have been injured or killed and their loved ones. How do you make sense of these type of senseless situations seems to be the question that's on everybody's mind and I don't know that there is a way to make sense of this sort of thing. As I watched the political pundit world, many are reflecting and grieving and trying to figure things out. But it's also true that others are working feverishly to find the tidbit or two that will exonerate their side from blame or implicate the other and watching that is as predictable as it is dispiriting."
"Did the toxic political environment cause this? A graphic image here--and ill-timed comment--violent rhetoric--those sort of things? I have no f---ing idea. We live in a complex ecosystem of influences and motivations and I wouldn't blame our political rhetoric any more than I would blame heavy metal music for Columbine. And, by the way, that is coming from somebody who truly hates our political environment. It is toxic. It is unproductive. But to say that that is what has caused this or that the people in that are responsible for this, I just don't think you can do.
"Boy would that be nice. Boy would it be nice to be able to draw a straight line of causation from this horror to something tangible because then we could convince ourselves that if we just stopped 'this' the horrors will end. To have the feeling, however fleeting, that this type of event can be prevented forever. It's hard not to feel like it can."
"You cannot outsmart crazy. You don't know what a trouble mind will get caught on. Crazy always seems to find a way. It always has."
"Which is not to suggest that resistance is futile. It sounded pretty dark what I just said there now that I reconsidered it inside my own head."
Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner posted YouTube videos
Gabrielle Giffords' husband Mark Kelly was one of the NASA astronauts who trained Colbert during his visit to Johnson Space Center in June 2010. Colbert taped a two part segment entitled "Fallback Position: Astronaut" for The Colbert Report.
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