Comments on: Stewart on fire

By: Kate Lee

Kate Lee — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 18:52:39 +0000

Wow! Damn, I skipped the interview in favor of a Missy Elliott video on MTV Jams. Gonna go check out that video.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 15:42:27 +0000

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).

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 15:29:04 +0000

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.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 14:24:12 +0000

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.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 14:07:50 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 13:54:35 +0000

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.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 13:53:00 +0000

John Stewart is (along with NPR) one of the best things about America.

By: dk.au

dk.au — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 09:28:27 +0000

He came out of that one better than the Colin Powell interview. Just.