Further, the prime practicioner of this practice, Jon Stewart, has an irritating "Clown nose on/Clown nose off" approach to his guests. He delivers serious points, but when confronted with serious rebuttal points, he immediately slips into the comedic role. Moreover, Stewart has a very bad habit of filibustering the people who he invites as guests, leaving his viewers with an uneven, if not one-sided debate.
But here is Stewart's Daily Show session with Cliff May, introduced as the head of "The Foundation of the Defence of Democracies".
Part 1
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 1 | ||||
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Part 2
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 2 | ||||
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Part 3
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 3 | ||||
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Stewart at 1:20 of Part 2 brings up the issue of whether dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was tortuous. May gets Stewart to say at 5:55 that he thinks that Truman was a war criminal for dropping the atomic bomb. Wow.
The point that I would have liked to see May use to rebut Stewart regarding the atomic bombs is that when we dropped those atomic bombs, we saw the rate of civilian casualties drop. Our campaign of firebombing cities was causing more casualties than our use of the atomic bombs. How can Stewart claim that we were immoral by dropping the atomic bombs, but avoid the greater casualties we were bringing the Japanese through firebombing?
At 3:00 of Part 2, Stewart asks if it is "OK that we violate every ethical standard that this country has been based on, and even if by doing so, people are still going to die...." and he answers (or more correctly, filibusters) his own question with "I'd rather hold my head up high, and say as a country, 'We lived up to the ideals of our Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the family of nations [whatever that means], and not gone past the point that would bring most people moral concern...., why can't we do that to every criminal in prison'...."
Here's the problem with that approach....
- First of all, it is an ethical standard of this country to do what is necessary to protect its citizens. Killing is immoral, but that is not an absolute. We make no apology for killing our enemies.
- "Moral Concern" is not universal. It is immoral in most Western cultures for a man to have multiple wives. In other cultures, that is not the case.
- The "why can't we do this to every criminal in prison" point is completely disingenuous or reflective of someone who doesn't understand what is going on here. A Prisoner of War is not necessarily a criminal. We're not holding him because he has violated some law. We are holding him to keep him off the battlefield. [And this bypasses completely the point that May makes that these al Qaeda prisoners do not qualify as POWs. They are "illegal combatants"--a point touched on in this interesting article, which I only skimmed. ] Stewart makes the mistake of substituting law enforcement for war. We are back to 9/10.
At 2:42 of Part 3, Stewart suggest an alternative to torture that we need to get better information by learning Arabic, learning more about the culture, and otherwise avoiding the need to resort to "torture". What he is missing is the 4th dimension--time. If we are faced with the Ticking Time Bomb scenario, we don't know if we have the time to get the information we seek by asking nicely. Stewart would sacrifice American lives to give us that time.
Stewart engages in what I have elsewhere labeled as "Navel-Gazing". He believes this is all about us and how we believe others perceive us. It is not about our enemies, or how they are behaving.
h/t Tigerhawk, via Ed Driscoll and Glenn.
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