Jon Stewart interviewed President Obama for the last time and told jokes instead of asking questions.
If Stewart retires, where will we find someone willing to let Obama spew nonsense at such length unchallenged?
I discussed Obama’s interview on RT on Wednesday, and someone asked me to post the Youtube, but RT has to do that, not me. So here’s the gist of what I think.
Stewart said to Obama: you’ve tried bombing and overthrowing leaders and arming rebels and … what’s that new thing … oh yeah, diplomacy.
Everybody laughed.
Obama talked up the Iran deal.
Stewart should have asked Obama a question, such as, “If you prefer diplomacy in this case, why not in many other cases where you seem to prefer war?” He could have followed up by asking about each war.
Stewart jumped in with another joke line to make absolutely sure Obama wouldn’t think he’d been asked something. “We still get to bomb people,” Stewart said. Obama’s response was not the stern reprimand he gave a reporter who suggested that Obama was choosing to leave U.S. prisoners in Iran. Nor was it the warning that some topics aren’t funny, which Obama applied recently to the topic of prison rape. In fact, Obama offered no objection at all to joking about bombing, and he’s done the same himself warning would-be boyfriends of his daughters that he could murder them with a drone.
Stewart also told a non-question joke about the tangled web of enemies of enemies in current U.S. wars in Western Asia. It’s worse than Stewart said, with U.S. weapons on both sides of every war, U.S. funding on both sides in Afghanistan, U.S. allies funding ISIS, the U.S. jumping into the Syrian war in 2014 on the opposite side of what it proposed in 2013, etc. But Stewart didn’t ask a question, such as, “The majority of weapons in the most violent region on earth are U.S. weapons; why not stop selling and giving them?” He could have followed up by asking for a justification for arming each brutal government. Instead he cut off the possibility of any serious answer with, “Who are we bombing?”
Obama has no idea who he’s bombing even with drone strikes. That’s what “signature strike” means. That’s why they just killed a leader of the non-existent Khorasan Group for the third time.
Obama held up the Cold War as a greater danger than Iran presents. Well, no kidding. Whatever the latest new food at McDonald’s is, is probably a greater danger than Iran presents. But Obama spoke as if the age of the United States and Russia pointing nuclear missiles at each other were over. And Stewart said nothing. During the Cold War, the U.S. military was in Western Europe. Now it’s on the Russian border playing war games. Captain Peace Prize is building more nukes, planning more nukes in Europe, and backing a dangerous coup government and a package of war lies in Ukraine more dangerous than a Cold War skirmish.
Of course if you make these complaints to Stewart he’ll laugh and claim not to be real news. Of course he isn’t. But neither are a lot of the news outlets that report on Stewart’s non-news as if it were news material. The fact is that we don’t have a lot of good news. Stewart’s excuse could be used equally by the New York Times. So how good an excuse is it, really?