Friday, November 12, 2010

Maddow/Stewart Interview, Complete & Uncut



I watched last night and contrary to what I was reading on the Twittersphere during the interview, I found it engaging, informative and honest. In TweetWorld, some were calling it boring, uninteresting and I was really quite shocked that people disagreeing with Stewart were checking out after watching just the first segment. What did they expect? Yelling and fisticuffs? Have we really become that ideological, that extreme that we can't even sit and listen to an interview/debate of what are considered to be two incredibly intelligent people, both on the liberal side of the aisle? Is the needle spiked the to the right edge on the National Attention Deficit Disorder Meter?

Yes, there were moments when Jon Stewart's parsing of some issues were a little much for my taste, but that's his opinion. He's entitled to it. We can all argue about the minutia of whether or not you consider George W. Bush "wrong" versus "evil" on his waterboarding stance. I don't think Bush was evil, just badly misguided. And if he felt it was morally wrong, he can claim plausible deniability and hide behind the lawyers that told him it was legal. Now Cheney on the other hand, I believe is truly evil but that's for another time.

Ultimately the crux of the interview confirmed my assessment of the Rally To Restore Sanity message: it wasn't about content, it was about tone.

1 comment:

NowhereMan said...

On waterboarding Bush was evil not misguided.The Geneva conventions which the U S had signed on say it is illegal.All he wanted was to get just one lawyer to say it was legal so he could authorize it.He didn't have some blue ribbon panel to study it and go with their recommendations over such a controversial subject."the lawyer said it was legal"as if to say "hey don't blame me"he did it deliberately so people can say later on he was misguided.He knew exactly what he was doing.That is EVIL.
Lets not forget Richard Clarke who after 911 is cornerd by Bush and asked if Saddam had any thing to do with 911 Clarke said "no"Bush instructed him to find proof it was Saddam even though Clarke Explained to him it was Al Qaida or the Downing street memos in which the Brits say the facts were being fixed by the Americans to justify the Iraq invasion.Thats not being misguided, Thats Evil.Or the time Bush in a press conference said Saddam had kicked the WMD inspectors out when they were still in Iraq turning every stone in the North,South and West where Rumsfeld claimed they'd be-thats not being misguided,thats being EVIL.
As Governor of Texas,he oversaw the execution of 152 people without commuting a single one.Then making fun of Carla Fay Tucker as she was about to be executed.Thats not being misguided_thats EVIL.

 
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