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Last night’s Daily Showwas a little different.  Instead of the show starting with Jon behind his desk, he was stood center stage to do his impersonation of Glenn Beck and announce to the world that he was infected with cancerous progressivism.

After the introduction, he continued his Beck impersonation for another thirteen minutes complete with blackboard diagrams, nonsensical word dissections, and just the right amount of batshit craziness.

Marc Thiessen is out doing talk shows to promote his book, Courting Disaster:  How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack.  It’s a book about how if our country stops torturing its war prisoners, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!

Thiessen, who when asked by CNN’s Christine Amanpour if he’d submit himself to waterboarding, said:    ”No because it’s terribly unpleasant and I’m not a terrorist.  heh heh heh…”  (link)

Yes… “terribly unpleasant.”  More like “brutally excruciating” according to a review of recently released internal CIA documents describing the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques.  Read all about it in the “Waterboarding for Dummies” article by Mark Benjamin over on Salon.com.

Thiessen will appear on The Daily Show tonight.

Here’s an excerpt from a review of his most un-American book written by a former senior military Interrogator:

First, Thiessen promulgates a theory that Islamic extremists are uniquely deserving of torture because they are doctrinally obligated to resist cooperating, after which they may disclose information. Of course this isn’t unique to Islamic extremists.  The U.S. military’s own Code of Conduct and the resistance training given American soldiers impose the exact same requirements. Article V, pertaining to interrogations states:  I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability.

…

Thiessen also argues that we will never know what other information we would have gotten out of KSM had we not used torture and abuse. … Serious interrogators have little doubt that we would have gotten better information from KSM, and sooner, had the interrogations been conducted by professional interrogators using noncoercive techniques.

…

Thiessen never bothers to cite military doctrine in his research.  Had he read the Army Field Manual’s instructions, he would have to answer for the fact that it cautions: “Revelation of use of torture by US personnel will bring discredit upon the US and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort.  It may also place US and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse by their captors.” Torture makes Americans less safe, not more so.

…

Thiessen and the torture apologists mock every American soldier who has followed the rules of law and ethical warfare.  He insults every interrogator who has learned to elicit information without resorting to medieval abuses. The America that I know and signed up to defend does not stand exclusively for security.  It also stands for freedom, justice, and liberty.  It stands for universal rights afforded to every human being (even unlawful combatants or “detained persons”).  America, as Thiessen surely has written into many a presidential speech, is a beacon of light precisely because it represents the protection of basic human rights.  Yet, in Courting Disaster, Thiessen thoroughly villainizes those who defend individual rights against the state (such as members of the Center for Constitutional Rights).  Thiessen’s ideology represents exactly what we are fighting against in the battle with Islamic extremism—the regression of human rights and the sacrifice of individual protections to the state.

I am looking forward to watching Jon Stewart pick this guy apart.

Update:  Here’s Jon Stewart’s interview of Thiessen on The Daily Show. 

If you thought Thiessen was a total dick before seeing this, well you’ll think even worse of him after watcthing it.  He truly is about as un-American as one can get.  As for Jon, he gets hot in this interview and gets accused by Thiessen of not letting him say his piece.  Note to Thiessen:  You weren’t invited on the show to give a speech.  It’s SUPPOSED to be a discussion.  And furthermore, when you place yourself in front of someone who truly believes in freedom and the rule of law, and you go off on how Liz Cheney is right to call those in the Justice Dept that represented Guantanamo detainees “the Al Qaeda 7” and question their loyalty, AND  you come on to promote your book that defends the military’s use of torture, you have to expect to be involved in a heated conversation like this.  So be a man and deal with it.

The feature segment of last night’s Daily Show illustrates how the Repbulicans can claim they are better at National Security than the Democrats. It’s pretty simple really. They are like that schoolyard kid that you never wanted to play with. Like him, they make up the rules as they go, and the rule changes are always in their favor. Stewart calls their game “Terror Ball.” It starts at about 2:20 into this clip with Rudy Giuliani making an incredilby stupid statement that he can only defend by invoking his party’s new rules for controlling the debate.

Dumb because he agreed to ba a guest on Glenn Beck’s show, and dumber because this clip makes Dauber look like the smart one. 

I guess his role on Coach wasn’t an act after all.

Roger Cohen wrote a column published in Thursday’s New York Times where he looks back to his time as a child spent in South Africa during the apartheid years and reasses his feelings in light of Obama’s speech.  I really do like this bit from the column:

Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?

Yes. It. Can.

The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.

One need only turn on one of the many 24-hour news channesl, Fox in particular, to see how Bush’s black-and-white world view has permeated the mainstream media.  It’s gotten to the point where if you want to watch anything close to an intellectual discussion on T.V., you’ve got to watch “comedy” shows like The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher.

So has discussion of Obama’s speech lifted the intellectual level of cable news to a higher plane?  Apparently not.

We’ve been watching this guy for about seven years now, and just when we start thinking that there’s probably not much more he can offer in the way of verbal gaffes or stupid statements, he comes up with this:

I try to make sure that when I’m with foreign leaders, there’s a pretty picture of the two of us walking down the colonnades, or something like that, to send a good message.

I watched the clip on last Thursday’s “Moment of Zen” and I couldn’t believe it.

Watch.

Has to do with Lord Cheney of course.

This is from today’s Seattle Post Intelligencer editorial:

Indeed, the notion of accountability is to Cheney what garlic is to a vampire.

The Daily Show had a great series about the Dick last week, watch them all!

Dick Move - John Oliver

Non Executive Decision – Dick, the fourth branch of government

You Don’t Know Dick – Safe -Cheney’s man-size safes

You Don’t Know Dick – Super pixelation power

You Don’t Know Dick – Blowfeldian “Secret” stamp logo 

If you missed the Bill Moyers interview of Jon Stewart last week like I did, well you can watch it on your computer right here.  And you should watch it… now!

As Bill Moyers points out during the interview, over the last couple of years Jon Stewart has become a “serious social and political critic.”

During the 33 minute interview there are clips of The Daily Show’s coverage of the Gonzales hearing, the McCain interview, the Ali Allawi interview, and the “We’re Making Progress” segment.  Moyers discusses each one with Stewart and talks with Jon about what was going through his head in each one.

Just a little of the transcript here to whet your appetite:

JON STEWART: After weeks of mock testimony, there you have it, Alberto Gonzales does not know what happened, but he assures you what he doesn’t remember was handled properly.

END CLIP: THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART

JON STEWART: And by the way, that was all just — that was a game, and he knew it, and the guys on the committee knew it. And for the President to come out after that and say, “Everything I saw there gave me more confidence in him,” that solidified my notion that, “Oh, it’s because what he expected of Gonzalez was” it’s sort of like, do you remember in GOODFELLAS? When Henry Hill got arrested for the first time and Robert DeNiro met him at the courthouse and Henry Hill was really upset, ’cause he thought Robert DeNiro would be really mad at him. And DeNiro comes up to him and he gives him a $100 and he goes, “You got pinched. We all get pinched, but you did it right, you didn’t say nothing.”

BILL MOYERS: Gonzales said nothing.

JON STEWART: Right. And “you went up there and said nothing. You gave them no legal recourse against you, and you made yourself a smart man, a self-made man look like an utter pinhead on national television, and you did it for me.”

and on the “surge”

JON STEWART:  …here’s the disconnect. It’s sort of this odd and I’ve always had this problem with the rationality of it. That the President says, “We are in the fight for a way of life. This is the greatest battle of our generation, and of the generations to come. “And, so what I’m going to do is you know, Iraq has to be won, or our way of life ends, and our children and our children’s children all suffer. So, what I’m gonna do is send 10,000 more troops to Baghdad.”

So, there’s a disconnect there between — you’re telling me this is fight of our generation, and you’re going to increase troops by 10 percent. And that’s gonna do it. I’m sure what he would like to do is send 400,000 more troops there, but he can’t, because he doesn’t have them. And the way to get that would be to institute a draft. And the minute you do that, suddenly the country’s not so damn busy anymore. And then they really fight back, and then the whole thing falls apart. So, they have a really delicate balance to walk between keeping us relatively fearful, but not so fearful that we stop what we’re doing and really examine how it is that they’ve been waging this.

Watch the whole thing.  It’s all good.

They’re only good when they advance your agenda, otherwise they’re downright treasonous.

This Daily Show piece shows how the first-term Bush used timetables to get the war started, and how the second-term Bush sure as hell isn’t about to use timetables to end the war.

Enjoy.

John McCain was on The Daily Show last Tuesday (Part I and Part II), and he received quite a different reception than he did the previous eight or nine times he’s been on the show. 

During his “straight talk” years, he’d been a great guest for Jon Stewart because he was different from the other Republicans, because he as a Republican and a conservative, but he wasn’t afraid to criticize Bush and the way the war was going.  The audience generally liked him and Jon could usually find some common ground with him and joke around about current events. 

On Tuesday, McCain had the difficult task of selling his position in favor of Bush’s “surge” to Jon and an audience that would prefer to see the U.S. pull out.  Stewart chided McCain about his “stroll through the market” and made a good case for why continuing the military fight is not worth it.  McCain responded with a Rumsfeld impression of asking a series of questions and answering them himself before Jon could respond.

In the past when he was on the show, the conversations between them were always pretty fun and they were respectful enough of each other to recognize when it was time to pause and let the other guy say a few words.  Not so during this interview.  Jon was even jokingly apologetic for the way his audience responded to some of McCain’s statements but, at one point, McCain just wouldn’t shut up about how it was wrong to not give the surge a chance and how the Democrats were giving up on it.  The debate then got pretty heated (for a Daily Show interview that is…) but Jon was able to calm McCain down and bring things back around to a more cordial level.  Midway through, Jon did stand up for his audience and say to McCain that all those people out there voicing displeasure with his stance on the war are patriotic Americans that only want what they think is best for the country.

I used to like McCain a little and I did have respect for his views even though I didn’t agree with him about most things.  I think that’s all starting to wear off now.

Needless to say, I will tune in the next time he’s on the show for what Jon said will be pure “shits and giggles.”