Thoughts on the Daily Show

As usual, I watched the Daily Show last night. John Stewart, after a two week vacation, was back and in top form. His September 11th show, the first one back was good, but last night's was killer. It seemed like John Stewart had been planning a really good hit on George W. Bush but didn't want to do it on 9/11. So he waited a day and dropped the hammer last night. Maybe it was just that due to tape delay, the "battle for civilization" quote wasn'tavailable at taping...

Picking up on George W. Bush's 9/11 speech, Stewart pointed out that (paraphrasing) 'if we're really in a battle for civilization, you'd think we'd send more troops.' This is a meme I've seen all over the place.


This is, in some ways, a very dangerous line of reasoning. Do we really want Bush to triple the number of troops in Iraq, as some have suggested?

We're calling the Republicans bluff on this one. We're counting on them backing down rather than raising the ante and dramatically increasing the number of American soldiers in Iraq. (Cough, cough, October Surprise, cough)

Granted, the soldiers would have to come from some where. A draft? We know that the Republicans don't want to initiate a draft - but it's Democrats that are calling for more troops. Do we want voters to think that Democrats are drafting Americans to fight an unpopular war? I'm not in favor of drafting Americans to serve in a Bush/Rumsfeld military.

The idea that a 'battle for civilization' should be one fought with the full weight of the United States of America is good only for pointing out theridiculous levels that the Republican rhetoric has reached - not as an actual strategy.

We need to be careful. If the Republicans call our bluff on this, we're fucked.

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