But, I had a good run with them. As Colbert himself described their routines, Jon Stewart deconstructs the news to highlight the idiocy, while Colbert creates news that is so farcical and yet, scarily enough, not that different from reality. They certainly helped me a lot during a good chunk of the ten years since 9/11, when the bipartisan war-mongering drove me practically insane. Watching those two guys was cathartic in many ways.
To such an extent, that I can even put together a compilation such as the one here, in order to mark the notorious anniversary that we are now approaching--the official start date of the Iraq War that began on March 19 2003.
I still cannot believe that Congress--the Democrats too, with very few exceptions--were all in support of the war that was led by Bush and Rumsfeld. The cheerleading that many did, including my favorite public intellectual--the late Christopher Hitchens--was just awful.
I thought it might help to review a few of the Stewart/Colbert clips to understand how we let this happen. But, everyone of the clips I have here, well, I could barely watch even a minute each before I clicked on stop. It is just too damn depressing to be funny.
The first one is from summer 2002, less than a year after 9/11:
A month later, remember this is still in 2002 and well before the actual invasion:
And, fast forwarding to the immediately after the invasion--"the turds" as Jon Stewart described the state of the 24x7 cable news networks
And then marking the completion of two years:
The President tastelessly, and arrogantly, even joked about not being able to find the weapons of mass destruction in the White House. You haven't forgotten that, have you?
Of course, the Iraq War is over, remember? Do you remember how that announcement was made?
Oh well ... as George Carlin noted after that first Gulf War, we can rest assured that we can bomb the shit out of a country with brown people :(
1 comment:
The Irag war is a perfect exam-ple of lunacy gone wild and how we cannot expect even mature democracies to behave responsibly. There are quite a few instances through the last 100 years - Vietnam war, Hiroshima & Nagasaki and Iraq - when American behavior, if done by any other country would have warranted launching proceedings in the International Criminal Court indicting war crimes.
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