Jon Stewart: Wimp, Wuss, Moral Coward
Can a Democrat commit war crimes? Of course not!
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 I
was a bit surprised, albeit pleasantly, to see Jon Stewart nail
Harry Truman as a war criminal. After all, Stewart is a typical
Hollywood liberal, whose politics are by now a staple of the corporate,
anodyne culture that permeates the airwaves, and this naturally
excludes everything that might challenge the liberal groupthink
that constitutes the conventional wisdom in the Age of Obama.
Certainly,
in "respectable" quarters, criticism of anything or anyone
connected to the great liberal "anti-fascist" crusade,
the "Good
War," is strictly verboten, and surely an intelligent
guy like Stewart knows this. Yet – contrary to what he said later
– this wasn't an argument that arose in the heat of the moment,
in the context of a robust
discussion with obnoxious neocon Clifford
May on the alleged merits of torture.
No, Stewart
had apparently thought this one out, at least to some extent, because
when May asked him if he thought Truman was a war criminal for nuking
two Japanese cities, he didn't just say "Yes" – he went
into a whole riff about how, if we had first demonstrated the power
of this new weapon on an uninhabited atoll somewhere, and then informed
the Japanese government that they'd better surrender, or else that
would happen in Japan, then and only then would it be okay to drop
the Big One. The audience cheered him on, as he took apart the frenetically
hysterical May, whose ferret-like
features and organizational affiliations make him the perfect
spokesman for a policy described by Stewart as "temporary insanity."
Yet, a few days later, Stewart was back to the same subject, minus
the rabid ferret, this time reversing his stance – and apologizing
for calling the little haberdasher a war criminal.
 My,
that was quick.
Alas, apparently
not quick enough for the executives at whatever network Stewart
appears on – yes, I know, I have to be the only person in America
who doesn't watch his show – who no doubt would have preferred that
he never said it at all. It was clearly the execs who reined in
the freethinking Stewart and laid down the law, and the first law
of "controversial," "provocative," and indubitably
"edgy" television commentary is to never – ever, ever!
– allow a deviation from the conventional wisdom that falls outside
the contemporary Left/Right paradigm.
Rule number
one in this game is that everybody must play their assigned role.
You've always got to be "in character." If you're on the
Left, you can take on George W. Bush, murderer of hundreds
of thousands of Iraqis – but not Harry Truman, killer of even
larger
numbers
of innocent Japanese civilians. Rightists regularly excoriate the
crimes of Stalin, yet they are expected to remain silent when
it comes to war crimes committed by the U.S., such as the "Phoenix
program" during the Vietnam conflict – and they rarely
disappoint.
Read
the rest of the article
May
7, 2009
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2009 Antiwar.com
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