...Jon Stewart.
Jon Stewart is always the winner when he hosts a guest with whom he vehemently disagrees, because he is always takes the high ground by being polite and treating his guests with dignity. He neither disparages them, nor does he allow his audience to show the slightest amount of disrespect by uttering boos or catcalls. Bronx cheers are verboten!
Sen. John McCain gets three points for appearing on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, if no other reason than he had the guts to face what he knew would be tough questions and a hostile crowd.
If twelve is the highest score one could get in the debate between Jon and John, then Jon won with a resounding eleven. The best McCain can say is that he didn’t get blitzed. I’ll get to the one point Stewart lost in a bit.
McCain has been a loser since he shook hands with the man whose campaign lied and spread the most vicious, vile rumors about him to insure his loss to George W. in the 2000 primaries.
It’s always wise to know your enemy, and to keep him close to keep pace with him or be one step head of him. But, when McCain kissed the ring of the tyrant and stood with him when Bush ran in ’04 was more despicable than Bush’s original sins against McCain.
McCain standing next to Bush in ’04 -- albeit looking as if he’d rather be in the dentist’s chair undergoing a triple root canal -- was a betrayal of himself and the American people. McCain was in fact, endorsing a man who McCain knew lied us into war, was doing all kinds of dastardly things to the Constitution, and exactly what incredibly underhanded, dirty, double dealing things Bush and his minions are capable of.
Here’s the one place I think Jon Stewart missed the mark, except he’s not alone. Almost everyone misses it every time those tired old talking points of “we’ve got to fight them over there before we have to fight them here,” or the new mantra of “if we set a timetable for the withdrawal of our troops, the terrorists will wait for us to leave.”
Every time those scare-tactic words are uttered, the purveyor of those words must be smacked down with the following:
* They did stun-punch us here before we followed them over there.
* Damn straight they’ll out-wait us. What the other side doesn’t seem to get is that they’ll wait for three months, or three years or three centuries.
It doesn’t seem to matter to the McCains that even the military is saying the war in Iraq can no longer be won militarily; we’re no longer at war with Saddam Hessein, we won that one. We now at war with people who are warring against each other, and no matter which side we choose to support…we lose.
The internal problems of Iraq are for the Iraqis to solve, and if they don’t do it politically, which it looks as if they’re not about to do, it’s going to be their long, bloody fight whether we’re there or not.
