John Mueller Does The Daily Show

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

This week The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is broadcasting from the Ohio State campus, thanks mainly to the fact that Ohio is a major battleground state in the coming election.

Stewart's guest last evening was John Mueller, professor of political science and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, Mershon Center.

Mueller was promoting his new book, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (Free Press, forthcoming on November 14). It is essentially an expansion of his argument in the October/November issue of Foreign Affairs ("Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?") Given Stewart's political sympathies, there was no doubt that Mueller's thesis would resonate with the host. The suspense centered on whether Mueller's sense of humor was up to the task. It was.

The segment is available in streaming video on the Daily Show web site: the Tuesday, October 31 episode, part 3.