One of the best daily shows I’ve ever seen tonight. No supporting cast, just Jon Stewart. Beginning of the show was an excellent smack down of Bush’s talking points on Iraq. Just a few highlights:
It’s clear that he has developed a sophisticated exit strategy…
for getting out of questions about the war.
It’s a strategy known as repetition, or repetition. How does it work? The first step is to let people know you’re aware of your questions.
Then the president can reduce these nuanced concerns into a simplistic guided concern, that he can easily refute.
…
The key for your new war rationale talking points is : delivering them as if the person who asked is retarded.
(Bush: fighting them in Iraq. So we do not have to face them at home. Where we live)
Of course, sometimes, no matter how good your talking points, no matter how much you repeat them, there are still, some dissenters and some non-believers. If only there was a way you could shut these people up with some kind of emotional bludgeon.
(Bush: Sept 11th, Sept 11th, Sept 11th…)
You know, if i had a nickel for every time Bush has mentioned 9/11, I could raise enough reward money to go after bin Laden…
The interviews have been lackluster recently, but his interview with Leftie-turned-Neocon-Bush Supporter Christopher Hitchens was the highlight of the show. Here’s the meaty part:
hitch: the big fallacy is people who say, there wouldn’t be all these terrorists in iraq if we hadn’t gone there… the people who say that the violence of these people is our fault are masochistic and capitulationists.
jon: but the people who say that we shouldn’t fight in iraq aren’t saying it’s our fault. that is the conflation that is most disturbing to me
hitch: but don’t you hear people saying…
jon: there are people who say a lot of stupid shit, but what i’m saying is there is reasonable dissent in this country about the way this war has been conducted that has nothing to do with people believing we should cut and run from the terrorists, or that we should show weakness in the face of terrorism, or that we believe that we have in some way brought this on ourselves. they believe that this war is being conducted without transparency, without credibility, and without (?)
hitch: but i’m sorry sunshine, i just heard you make fun of the president for saying he wouldn’t give a timetable.
jon: no, you’ve misunderstood why…no, that’s not why i ridiculed the president. what i ridiculed the president for was: he refuses to answer questions for adults as though we were adults, and falls backs on platitudes and phrases and talking points. that does a disservice to the goals that he himself shares with the very people he needs to convince.
(wild applause. jon gives hitchens a nouggie)
hitch: you want me to believe that really you secretly are on his side you just wish he was more persuasive?
jon: i secretly need him to be on my side. he’s too important and powerful a man not to be.
Why, oh, why is a comedy show the only place in the media we can hear this?
Update: Crooks and Liars has the video.
August 26th, 2005 at 4:28 am
He came out of that one better than the Colin Powell interview. Just.
August 26th, 2005 at 8:53 am
John Stewart is (along with NPR) one of the best things about America.
August 26th, 2005 at 8:54 am
It was a terriffic show – I loved the “Symbolic Mom-Off!” But I think a huge point was overlooked.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I have come to believe that the US is NOT fighting terrorism in Iraq. The people attacking us in Iraq are the Sunnis and their allies, who are pissed that the Shiites are taking their power. The insurgents are not terrorists in the sense that if we left Iraq, they would not come after us (though this is not an argument to leave Iraq).
Yes there are terrorists in the Middle East, but I think every time the President says we’re in Iraq fighting terrorism, someone needs to jump up and say, “No, we’re fighting insurgents.”
This is kinda similar to Sean’s prescription for fighting Intelligent Design. A key point in ending the controversy is to explain to people that there is NO controversy among scientists.
August 26th, 2005 at 9:07 am
I would say that they’re terrorists in the sense that some of them are using terrorist tactics. But then, it’s not as if we haven’t used them ourselves in the past (firebombing enemy cities in the Second World War, for example). Although ‘terrorist’ is often used as a shorthand for ‘evil person’, it should be (to my mind) more a description of tactics than a normative judgement.
As to how many of these people would have taken this particular path had we not invaded Iraq in the first place, that’s a good question.
August 26th, 2005 at 9:24 am
And I’d have a lot more time for Hitchens if he hadn’t adopted, of late, this paranoic/Pavlovian response to any criticism of the conduct of the war. He could support the original idea without endorsing the competence of the adminsitration in conducting the execution; he did use to talk a bit about the incompetence in the execution of the post-war but he now seems so interested in cheerleading for the idea that he’s happy to forget to concentrate on the somewhat more important issue of carrying the damn thing out.
I might be doing him a disservice, as I’ve not followed him that closely of late (last I really looked at was the Galloway-Hitchens feud, where he was on a loser from the start); these are just my impressions from what I have seen.
August 26th, 2005 at 10:29 am
Hitch is a great polemicist, which is cool when he’s on your side. When he switches sides, you suddenly realize “Hey, he’s not making sense, he’s just using every rhetorical trick he knows to score cheap points.” Which is why ultimately it’s the boring and logical people who are important, not the polemicists.
August 26th, 2005 at 10:42 am
Speaking of polemicists, I trust that you all got to see George Galloway flaying Sens Coleman and Levin awhile back? Much hilarity (for all that Gorgeous George is no angel, oh no).
August 26th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
Wow! Damn, I skipped the interview in favor of a Missy Elliott video on MTV Jams. Gonna go check out that video.