Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart at “The Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium” at George Washington University with E.D. Hill, left, moderating. (Getty Images/Jamie McCarthy)

America, or at least the America for which the live video stream actually loaded, got the debate it wanted last night when Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart dissected the issues and each other at George Washington University.

Three days after a rather boring presidential debate in which an animated Mitt Romney worked over a placid President Obama, O’Reilly and Stewart took a more unvarnished tack in discussing the economy, entitlement reform and the temperature of the public discourse. For the sardonic host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, it was an opportunity to pull his sparring partner, a famously loquacious conservative, toward the middle.

E.D. Hill, a CNN anchor, served as moderator, turning in a performance that was more lively than the one PBS’ Jim Lehrer when he referred Obama and Romney on Wednesday, but only just so. Hill’s first question tackled federal entitlement spending, with O’Reilly getting the first crack at whether it should be reined in as the government continues to accrue debt.

“I don’t care,” O’Reilly began, wryly. But he quickly turned serious, delivering a blunt, conservative diagnosis.

“About 20 percent of us are slackers and it’s a growing industry,” O’Reilly said, referring to a class of Americans he described as only interested in collecting government benefits without looking to be part of the workforce.

O’Reilly said the Georgetown student Sandra Fluke—who was roped into the national dialogue this year when she testified before Congress about birth control—was the “poster child for entitlement.” The garrulous Fox News host invoked Fluke to bemoan a facet of the 2010 health care law that subsidizes birth control medicine.

Stewart was not impressed with O’Reilly’s opening remarks.

“My friend Bill O’Reilly is completely full of shit,” he said. “Birth control is now covered the same way Viagra is covered.”

Stewart said a swath of voters live in a fantasy realm full of half-truths and outright disposal of facts. He called this place “Bullshit Mountain” and beseeched O’Reilly—with whom he has a warm, albeit dichotomous, relationship—to descend the slopes.

“I have come here tonight to plead to the mayor of Bullshit Mountain,” Stewart said to one of many rapturous rounds of applause he received from the mostly college-aged crowd filling the 1,500-seat Lisner Auditorium.

But O’Reilly had applause lines of his own, particularly when delivering a boilerplate response about the importance of decreasing the federal debt. Where he lost to Stewart, though, was in his prescription on how to reduce the government’s red ink. Repeating Romney’s Wednesday-night canard about ending federal support for public broadcasting offered Stewart several openings to contrast the relatively piddly amount spent on PBS to the outlays for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Still, to couch Stewart and O’Reilly as proxies for Obama and Romney would be a disservice to both. Each found plenty of faults with their supposed party lines. Stewart criticized the Obama administration’s mishandling of the killing last month of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya. O’Reilly told the audience he thought the Iraq War was a grave mistake.

“We should not have gone to Iraq. Afghanistan we had to,” he said.

“Somebody better live-tweet that motherfucker!” Stewart proclaimed. Later, O’Reilly reminded reporters that it’s a position he has repeated often on his Fox News program.

However, the pair were almost always in disagreement on the subject of entitlement programs and government subsidies for basic services. Even when Stewart brought up O’Reilly’s childhood in Levittown, N.Y., a planned community that was built up with the assistance of the Federal Housing Administration, O’Reilly was reticent to acknowledge the role of government in supporting the working and middle classes.

Yet the evening was not one of only dry policy comparisons. Both Stewart and O’Reilly were quick to remind everyone that the evening’s presentation was entertainment, not serious politics. Much was made of their jarring height difference. The 6-foot-4-inch O’Reilly loomed over the 5-foot-7-inch Stewart so starkly that the comedian’s lectern was outfitted with a hydraulic platform. Later, when they were seated at the front of the stage to take audience questions, Stewart hopped on O’Reilly’s lap as part of his answer to a query about bipartisanship.

Another audience question asked them to name the one person they would like to see serve as president. O’Reilly dryly nominated Clint Eastwood. On cue, Stewart hopped out of his chair and said, “Why don’t we ask him?”

Perhaps the greatest concordance came when the conversation arrived at a shared favorite topic—the political media and the often screeching tones taken by personalities on talk radio and cable news. But even a professional barker like O’Reilly saw the faults in his colleagues.

“The problem with discourse is capitalism,” he said. “You can make a lot of money as an assassin, left-wing or right-wing.”

Beyond the 1,500 paying spectators inside the theater, “The Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium” was also broadcast to Internet viewers who each paid $4.95 to watch a live broadcast. Shortly before the program began, however, many customers began complaining on Twitter that the website hosting the debate would not load. A spokeswoman for the event said that servers might have been overloaded by a last-minute surge of people attempting to tune in. (The debate will also be available to download later.) Half the profits from the debate are being donated to a group of charities selected by Stewart and O’Reilly, including the USO, Doctors Without Borders, Wounded Warrior Project and the Alzheimer’s Association.

That two freewheeling television hosts provided a more engaging show than two preprogrammed politicians was hardly surprising. But the goal of smart, civil discourse was satisfied even if one participant began the evening by accusing his opponent of being lodged on “Bullshit Mountain.”

“It’s an ongoing conversation, and I don’t think you can look at this as a match where there’s a winner and the winner takes all,” Stewart said after the debate. “The thing that strikes me is to find an honest conversation.”

O’Reilly concurred. “Plus if it’s entertaining at the same time and you get people locked in and thinking about what’s being said and you have a few laughs,” he said. “The display you saw tonight is why America is America—robust, creative, no-holds-barred. Call it whatever you want, you won’t see it in many other countries.”

To which Stewart added: “You won’t see this height difference in many countries.”