Centripetal Notion

Probably the most poignant interview I’ve seen with John Stewart — this time on Bill Moyers Journal — discussing the role of the Daily Show, Stewart’s opinions on the war, and offering a few props to the political blogosphere.

[The war] hasn’t affected us here in the way that you would imagine a five-year-war would affect a country. (…)

The president says we’re in the fight for our way of life — this is the greatest battle of our generation, and of the generations to come. (…) 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 going to do is send 10,000 more troops to Baghdad.” So there’s a disconnect there between — you’re telling me this is the fight of our generation, and you’re telling me you’re going to increase troop strength by 10% — and that’s going to do it. I’m sure what he’d like to do is send 400,000 more troops there but he can’t because he doesn’t have ‘em. 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.

VIDEOS (via 3quarksdaily)