Stewart on Maddow

Jon Stewart did a nearly 50 minute interview with Rachel Maddow tonight, which he claims he wanted to do to discuss some of the criticisms of the rally, with at least the implication being that he wanted to clear his name a bit and clarify what it was really about as opposed to how it was perceived. What really happened, in my opinion, was that he made himself look even more foolish than at the rally. I'll embed it below, but first list a very few thoughts on things that jumped out to me (so just go down to the video if you don't care).

- Stewart takes aim at some of the charges leveled by Bill Maher, both directly and indirectly. His response that really jumped out and was the most absurd was concerning the "claim" that George W. Bush is a war criminal. He accepts the charge as "technically" true, but then goes on a very misguided polemic about why it is somehow not worth asserting because it is a "conversation stopper." His logic here is that the moment that you assert this fact to someone on the right, they will stop taking you seriously, pigeon-hole you as an extremist, etc.. This is ridiculous on a number of levels, the most obvious being that just because a truth isn't popular doesn't mean it is any less deserving of attention. In fact, the better argument would be that it is more deserving of attention. Secondly, and even more absurdly, he goes on to compare Bush to a number of of other war criminals, particularly Saddam Hussein, and draws the conclusion that, well, sure, Bush may be a war criminal, but he isn't as bad as those other war criminals. As if that excuses his war crimes! This is absolutely heinous. War crimes are not judged against other war crimes, they are judged against the law. This comes back to exactly what Maher was talking about when he discussed Republicans staking out a position that is further and further to the right, and then demanding Democrats to meet them in the middle. Only now we're talking about acts that even the United States recognizes as "crimes against humanity." Finally, I would add that the illegal wars perpetrated by the Bush administration, now carried out by the Obama administration, made life a lot worse for a lot more people in the Middle East (and certainly in the US) than Saddam Hussein did, and in a remarkably shorter time period.

- You can see Maddow getting progressively more frustrated with Stewart throughout the interview, and Stewart remaining remarkably smug throughout. The claim that Maddow seemed most frustrated about, and rightfully so, is Stewart's claim that he has repeated ad nauseum over the last decade that he somehow isn't a member of the media, and that people don't take him all that seriously. Maddow on multiple occasions pressures him on what the difference is between their two shows, and as a response Stewart only concocts vague metaphors that entail him throwing things at people in the political arena (Restoring sanity indeed!).

- The one point Stewart makes well is that the discordancy should not be between Democrats and Republicans, but rather between, as he puts it, "corruption and non-corruption", or, to put it a bit more legibly, the have's and the have not's (though I don't think that that is how he would ever put it).