Lincoln Madison

Analysis of Ranked-Choice Voting: SF D.A. 2011

2011-11-17T15:57:00.000-08:00

The bulk of the media attention to last week's local election in San Francisco has been directed at the mayoral race — the first competitive contest under both public financing and ranked-choice voting (RCV). However, digging a bit beneath the surface of the election of the District Attorney sheds some light on how RCV played out. I was able to download the entirety of the ballots from a public website. To be clear, I cannot tell how a specific person voted; however, I can tell you exactly how many people voted for Bill Fazio in 1st place, George Gascón in 2nd place, and David Onek in 3rd place: 1,055. I can also tell you that the progressives who supported the ticket of Onek–Bock–Fazio (recommended by the San Francisco Bay Guardian/sfbg.com and others) had the unintended effect of helping George Gascón to an easy win. Although she was the second choice of the "anybody but Gascón" crowd, Sharmin Bock's core supporters clearly were not fully on board with the concept.

An important caveat is that the data I downloaded were preliminary results, and do not include the last 2,603 ballots (1.39%) to be processed.

Before I get into the heart of the discussion, there are some interesting factoids buried in the data. The most popular ballot cast — and indeed the only one more popular than completely blank — was for George Gascón only, with no backup choice. A total of 24,045 people, or 13.92% of voters who expressed any preference at all, voted only for George Gascón, including the 102 who voted for him only as their 2nd choice and the 45 who voted for him as both 1st and 3rd choice but nobody for 2nd choice. Far more relevant is that Gascón was marked somewhere on the ballots of 107,731 voters (62.36%), compared with 106,391 voters (61.58%) who supported Sharmin Bock. David Onek was in a distant third, with only 78,713 voters (45.56%) giving him the nod at any level, barely ahead of exactly 72,000 (41.68%) who supported Bill Fazio. (The percentages add to more than 100% because I am combining 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice votes in the totals.)

**Bock eliminated**
	Round 2	pickup from Bock	total votes
Gascón	80,538	+15,786	96,324
Onek	44,606	+12,528	57,134
Gascón's margin of victory:			39,190

**Onek eliminated**
	Round 2	pickup from Onek	total votes
Gascón	80,538	+6,805	87,343
Bock	42,391	+27,940	70,331
Gascón's margin of victory:			17,012

In the first round of the RCV process, Gascón led with 72,453 votes, with Onek at 40,066 and Bock at 35,920. Because it was mathematically impossible for Bill Fazio (18,114 first-place votes, and only 72,000 total votes) or Vu Vuong Trinh (6,210 first-place, 24,963 total) to overcome Gascón's lead, they were both eliminated in the first round, with their votes transferred to their 2nd or 3rd choice selections. That left Gascón still with a sizable lead but less than 50%, with Onek and Bock neck-and-neck for runner-up, but Onek's first-choice advantage enabled him to squeak past Bock into the final round, even though Bock picked up half again as many votes from Fazio and Trinh as Onek did. Thus, Sharmin Bock was eliminated and her votes redistributed to Gascón and Onek. Those Bock voters, though, supported Gascón by a margin of 15,786 to 12,538 for Onek, allowing Gascón to coast to an easy victory.

If Sharmin Bock had been able to pull ahead of David Onek, his supporters' next-choice votes would have favored her by more than 4-to-1 over George Gascón, 27,940 to 6,805. The final outcome would have been the same — Gascón's lead was simply insurmountable — but it would have cut his margin of victory by more than half. If the overall race had been closer, Gascón's fate could easily have ridden on who came in second.

**Total votes by rank**
	1st	2nd	3rd	total
Sharmin Bock	35,920	51,660	18,811	106,391
George Gascón	72,453	22,012	13,266	107,731
David Onek	40,066	20,333	18,314	78,713

A few more factoids: Sharmin Bock received more 2nd-choice votes than George Gascón and David Onek combined, and also led in 3rd-choice votes. She was the favored 2nd-choice not only of the Onek–Bock–Fazio "anybody but Gascón" ticket, but also of Gascón's supporters and Trinh's supporters, but Bill Fazio's supporters backed Gascón. Bock also came in 2nd among voters who chose only one candidate, with 8,678 votes to Gascón's 24,045, Onek's 6,187, and Fazio's 5,317. The Bay Guardian's "clean slate" (O-B-F) received 10,721 votes, making it the third most popular ballot, after "Gascón only" and "no vote." Out of 184,808 total ballots, including 12,045 undervotes, only 90,072 voters selected three different candidates as their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choices. A total of 45,800 voters chose only one candidate; of those voters, 37,768 marked their candidate only as a 1st choice, 301 only as a 2nd choice, and 157 only as a 3rd choice.

There has also been a great deal of discussion about voter confusion regarding the process of ranked-choice voting. Some of the odd ballot markings do indeed demonstrate that some voters were unclear on the concept. For example, 157 voters chose no one for 1st or 2nd, but selected one of the candidates as their 3rd choice. (Those ballots were promoted to 1st-choice, so they did count.) While it is tempting to picture a voter making a stand for "None of the Above" as their first choice, defiantly digging in on the second, with a reluctant concession to reality in the third-choice slot, it's rather more likely they simply didn't know what they were doing. Even more confused were voters who chose the same candidate for 1st and 3rd, but a different one for 2nd. A total of 1,312 voters made that nonsensical mistake, led by the 240 who voted for Gascón–Fazio–Gascón. There were 9,277 voters who marked the same candidate in two or three consecutive slots; the extra ranking was simply disregarded. Still, with 172,763 marked ballots, the overwhelming majority cast clear and unambiguous ballots, suggesting that the "voter confusion" angle is little more than media hype.

Transcript: Bill Clinton on The Daily Show

2011-11-08T23:59:00.000-08:00

Bill Clinton was the featured guest on tonight's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. The extended interview is in 3 segments, embedded video below, with the transcript of part 1 after the jump. Parts 2 and 3 of the transcript will be added tomorrow. Update: transcript of all 3 segments completed.

Copyright ©2011 Comedy Central, all rights reserved. Transcript presented under "fair use" in the furtherance of political discourse.

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Jon Stewart: Welcome back! My guest tonight: the 42nd President of these United States. His new book is called Back to Work: Why we need smart government for a strong economy. Please welcome back to the program President Bill Clinton!

Nice to see ya!

Bill Clinton: Thank you. Thank you.

Stewart: Hope all is well. How are ya?

Clinton: Good.

Stewart: You look good.

Clinton: At my age, you know, it's a minute-by-minute thing, but I think —

Stewart: No, I gotta tell ya: you look younger than me; I don't like it. [audience laughs] Back to Work: Why we need smart government for a strong economy — this is — there are very specific prescriptions for how to run this country. Have you signed a copy of this to President Obama? Because he, I think, would be very interested in flipping through it.

Clinton: First of all, you know, the second half of the book are the specific things I think should be done. Several of them have already been advocated by the President, and in each case I say, this is something they're doing now. The first half of the book explains how we got in this mess, and basically the economic and social history of the last thirty years. So I did it because I wanted Americans to know that how we're doin' now, compared to our history and our competitors, and the answer is, we're still doin' pretty well, but thigns are not going in the right direction. They're going in the wrong direction, and now, what will we need to do to turn it around? I don't know if you saw the headline today, 49 million Americans living below the poverty line —

Stewart: Oh! I thought you were going to say 49 million Americans accused Herman Cain! Okay, so you got 49 million Americans living below the poverty line. I didn't know where you were going. But what you said was more salient, so let's stick with that.

Clinton: Maybe not as good of a press coverage, but more salient.

Stewart: Right.

Clinton: So, anyway, what I tried to do is to say, first, if you look at this economic problem we've got, it's very important — and I think maybe nobody, including me, maybe we haven't been clear enough to the American people. If you go back 500 years, whenever there's a financial meltdown, that, as compared with a traditional recession, takes between 5 and 10 years to get over. If, going back to the time of — over 100 years or so of widespread home ownership, if you have a mortgage collapse at the same time, it takes a little longer. So, what our goal should be in America is to beat those odds, and to do it in a way that restores our competitive position in the world, and the fundamental problem we've got in America today — and this is my beef with the Tea Party, and with the "no compromise ever on taxes, never, never, never" crowd in Congress — is that what works in real life is people getting together with different perspectives and figuring out how to solve problems. Cooperatino works. What works in politics is conflict. And so — but the American people somehow know that, so these Tea Party guys must be totally bewildered that approval of Congress is 8% or something, and they say, all we're doing is what we told you we were gonna do if you voted for us, you voted for us, now we're doing what we told you we were gonna do. They don't understand is that what people really voted for was a kind of amorphous sense that things weren't getting better and maybe there was too much governmnet, maybe they'd balance it out. So I try to be very specific in this book about things we could do.

Stewart: But that's been a very successful tack, is to say, get government out of our lives. Have the Democrats made the case that government should actually be in our lives, and then made the case that it is effective and accountable in the 21st century, because it hasn't shown itself to be very agile or effective in combattng these crises?

Clinton: Well, actually, I think, people judge it in a pretty straightforward way. Trust in government was at an all-time high because the economy was working and government was working. Trust in government goes down when the economy is in the tank, but I personally believe that the President had to act — first President Bush, then President Obama — to save the financial system. I think they had to do something, or should have, to do what President Obama did to restructure the automobile industry. It wasn't a bailout, it was a restructuring. We're gonna get our money back, and there are 80,000 more people working. And if they hadn't done it, there would be 2 million fewer people working. But you've got to put this into some context. You've got to say the stimulus did almost exactly what it was supposed to do, except it was too small. The economy shrunk 7.5%. We lost 7.5% of GDP at the bottom of that recession. Trillions of dollars in wealth — 75% of Americans' wealth is in their homes — they lost so much of it. You can't fill a multi-trillion-dollar hole with $800 billion — at least, I can't. I can't figure out how to make the math work.

Stewart: I would like to try that.

Clinton: But it put a floor under the recession and kept it from being a depression, but it couldn't lift us all the way out. So, what we have to do now is, all of us ask ourselves, what is the best way to crawl our way out of this, and when should we deal with the long-term debt problem — not if but when. And the argument I make in the book is, the reason all these people ought to be working together instead of fighting is that you cannot, for example, deal with the debt problem, as the British are now finding —

Stewart: — with austerity.

Clinton: — with austerity unless you have growth. If you have growth, then when you cut the deficit, for example, you get lower interest rates, you save money for homeowners, you save money for businesses, you get more money invested. But if interest rates are already virtually 0%, there's no activity, if you have huge cutbacks now, probably what will happen is that tax revenues will go down even more than spending will be cut, and the deficit will get worse. We've got to grow the economy and put people back to work.

Stewart: Here's what we're gonna do: we're gonna take a break. When we come back, we're gonna talk about growth. You and me, together, we're gonna form some sort of a "club" for growth. We'll be right back with more, President Bill Clinton.

Part 2

Stewart: We're back here, we're talkin' to President Bill Clinton about growth. Now, the Republican argument for growth is always the same, in almost any condition, which is: deregulate and cut taxes. I'm surprised to see in the book, there is — you do say, corporate tax should come down. When you were President, you lowered capital gains [tax]. Is that saying — why is that? Because it seems to increase income inequality rather than help it.

Clinton: Well, let's talk about now, but briefly: keep in mind, when I was President, first I raised taxes —

Stewart: Right.

Clinton: — on individuals and corporations — on the wealthiest 1.2% of us and on the corporations, and I cut the deduction corporations could take for executive compensation and eliminated the deduction for lobbying expenses. So then, when the Republicans won the Congress, I basically believed that the citizens geared for compromise, and I thought, number one, we were trying to balance the budget — we were 90% of hte way home before the Balanced Budget Act even passed — and if I agreed to cut the capital gains rate from 28% to 20%, in return for that, what I got was the higher-education tax credits (the Hope Scholarships, we called them) and a million people in work-study — the biggest increase in higher-education aid since the G.I. Bill — and the Children's Health Insurance Program, which now insures about 10 million kids, and, if you read the poverty report today, is single-handedly responsible for millions of kids moving out of poverty, so I thought it was a good compromise, and I didn't think it would hurt the economy. I didn't understand why we went to 15% — I personally thought that was way too low, because the average person pays, with all the deductions and everything, about 20% – 20½% in taxes, and I don't think you want capital gains to get too much below that. That's not good policy. But I thought it was an honorable compromise. Now, where are we now? When I raised the corporate tax rate from 33% to 35% for corporations with incomes over $10 million a year, that put us smack-dab in the middle of all the rich countries. Since then, everybody's done two things: they've lowered their corporate tax rate and they have stopped taxing the income that corporations earn in other countries when it comes home.

Stewart: So there's amnesty on any of that money. They can bring that home and it's not —

Clinton: We're the only — yeah, in other countries.

Stewart: Right.

Clinton: We still do it. We say, you get a deduction for what you pay in other countries, but you still owe the 35% minus the deduction.

Stewart: But the real rate — corporate tax rate — is much lower than that in the United States.

Clinton: Yeah. So, the reason I think it should change is, first, most people aren't paying it. The corporate tax take — the actual amount paid — is 23%, which is 1% below the average of other wealthy countries — so, what I recommend is that we broaden the base (that is, eliminate some of the credits and deductions, or at least smooth them out, have a de facto alternative minimum for corporate income) and get pretty close to that 23%, but we should leave it maybe at 24% or 25%, whatever it takes to fund a very generous research and development tax credit, because I want to bring manufacturing jobs — high-end manufacturing jobs — back to America, and increasingly manufacturers all over the world want their research and development to be close to their manufacturing. We've got a huge chance to do that now, and so I would leave the R&D tax credit. I would eliminate the others. One real problem is, there is no correlation between the amount of corporate tax that companies pay and whether they're creating jobs in America, so if you flatten it out, you'll be rewarding the job generators in America.

Part 3

Stewart: This is the point that I was — drives me crazy: you know, they say corporations are people, they have the rights, but they're not Americans. So, the idea that we could drop —

Clinton: I don't think they are people; I hate that Citizens United decision.

Stewart: So do I! Drives me crazy, because if they're people, they're sociopaths. They have no morality.

Clinton: Here's the deal.

Stewart: They just have a profit motive for shareholders; that's not a moral individual.

Clinton: Well, when I went to law school, I was probably in the Dark Ages, in the 70's —

Stewart: That's when I went.

Clinton: I was — yeah, were you born then? — anyway, I was part, virtually, of the last generation of American law students and business students taught that corporations had a responsibility — because they had special privileges under the law, like limited liability — to their stakeholders: to their shareholders, their employees, their customers, and the communities of which they were a part. But starting in the late 70's, that practice changed, and all of a sudden, the stakeholders were way up — the shareholders were way up here, and all the stakeholders were down here. It had the ironic consequence of giving the most influence over corporate decisions to the stakeholders with the least concern about the long-term profitability of the corporation and the greatest concern about the short-term profitability, which accelerated a lot of these trends.

Stewart: [inaudible]

Clinton: So we need to be competitive because we want them to — they've got $2 trillion they could bring back here and invest — but we also need to try to create an ethic in America where the employees and the customers and the communities count, too, and we need to make it easier for those corporations to act that way again. We can help and support that. We need — but that's the point I try to make in the book. What works everywhere — the countries that are doing great, that have a higher percentage of college graduates than we do, higher growth rates, lower income inequality — are countries where there's a partnership, a working relationship with government and business. The communities in America that are doing great — Orlando — I was in Orlando last night. They have one hundred computer simulation companies.

Stewart: It's the happiest place on earth.

Clinton: Yeah. Well, they got Disney and Universal and Global Entertainment Arts videogame division — they all need simulators, right? They also get $5 billion a year from the Defense Department and NASA, the space agency, because they need simulators. And they've got a university, the University of Central Florida, with 53,000 students, that will change the curriculum every single semester to train people to do the jobs.

Stewart: So, who is doing the manufacturing policy? Who is planning this at a central level? That's the thing that makes me crazy. It doesn't seem like we have one. China's got a factory with 400,000 people in it; they work in conditions that no American should ever have to experience. Cutting Apple's corporate tax rate isn't gonna bring that —

Clinton: We don't have to do that. We don't have to do that. What we have to do — that shouldn't be the government's role. We should figure out is, where do we have a competitive advantage? For example, in solar energy and wind energy — both of which would already be competitive with coal if you had to pay the extraneous costs of coal, the healthcare costs and other things — and which will be — wind within 2 years, solar within 5, will be competitive in price with coal; they're both cheaper than nuclear right now. And I think — what we need to do is to make sure that we meet the competition in terms of the tax incentives and other things to bring these manufacturing jobs here. If we do, we're gonna do fine. We've got a great venture capital network, we have massive capacity in all these clean-tech areas. Just think about it: we were bypassed in the last decade by Germany in the production and deployment of solar cells. The sun shines, on average, in Germany as much as it does in London. But Deutsche Bank — not Greenpeace, Deutsche Bank — [Jon Stewart laughs] — did a study saying that even if you account for the subsidies the German government and German people paid to get that solar, they still netted 300,000 jobs. So, we're four times as big and twice as capable, so you do the math: it's 2½ million jobs if we do what they did. We have got to be competitive in these areas, and I don't mind giving people tax credits, but it ought to be to generate jobs and opportunity in America.

Stewart: You're saying there's gotta be caveats associated with it; I agree. Back to Work — you should read this; it's on the bookshelves now. President Bill Clinton. Thank you.

Transcript: Billo on Daily Show 9/28/2011

2011-09-28T23:29:00.000-07:00

Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly was the guest on tonight's Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The embedded video and transcript appear after the fold. (Update: complete transcript of Part 1 [as aired on Comedy Central] and Part 2 [web extra from TheDailyShow.com])

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Transcript, Part 1

Jon Stewart: Welcome back! My guest tonight, he is the host of the Fox News show The O'Reilly Factor; his new book is called Killing Lincoln: the shocking assassination that changed America forever. Please welcome back to the show Mr. Bill O'Reilly!

[to O'Reilly] Sir! Come and sit! A pleasure, sir, a pleasure.

Bill O'Reilly: [to audience] Thank you.

Stewart: Thank you so much for being here. The book is — and, again, I don't want to criticize your cover designer — Bill O'Reilly Killing Lincoln.... [audience cheers] By the way, it is an excellent book and a nice read and, uh ...

O'Reilly: Somebody read it to you?

Stewart: Damn you, O'Reilly! Always quick on the draw! Uh, excellent book; you're going to sell, I think, millions and millions of copies.

O'Reilly: Thank you.

Stewart: We're not going to talk about it.

O'Reilly: Okay.

Stewart: Here's what I want to ask you: You were on your show the other night — I watch it frequently — you say, if Obama raises your taxes to 50%, which you believe is possible, that you may not do your show any more?

O'Reilly: Right. I'll take Colbert's place.

Stewart: Yeah! You know he's faking it?

O'Reilly: Somebody has to.

Stewart: What percentage of that threat is empty?

O'Reilly: Uh, all of it.

Stewart: You're not goin' anywhere!

O'Reilly: No, no. There comes a point where, if you're gonna be taxed by the federal government at fifty, and then you gotta pay your property taxes, your sales taxes, your tolls to get into the city. They're charging admission to get into New York City, $14.50 to get in.

Stewart: And yet free to go to New Jersey. [audience laughs] What are you gonna do?

O'Reilly: Well, it comes a point where you say, you know, Is this worth it?

You and I both work hard — well, I do — [audience groans] Hey! He's got 18 writers back there!

Stewart: Somebody's gotta peel the carrots!

O'Reilly: True, and that's a good point: you and I employ a lot of people —

Stewart: That's right.

O'Reilly: — and a lot of people depend on us.

Stewart: We're job creators.

O'Reilly: We are! The entrepreneurial class.

Stewart: But, but, this whole idea that somehow the tax burden would become so onerous on us, that we would just rather not take home $3 million if we can't get that $3.5 million — fuck it! Do you know what I mean? That's crazy talk and you know it!

O'Reilly: You're not makin' that much money!

Stewart: Here's all I'm sayin': What is this whole business with the "poor, poor" rich and wealthy in this country? So unfair to them!!

O'Reilly: Are you ever gonna wise up? Ever?? I mean, we've been doin' this dance....

Stewart: Teach me, professor.

O'Reilly: Okay.

Stewart: Teach me.

O'Reilly: I don't mind payin' 40%, but first they're gonna have to stop wasting the money. One word: Solyndra. Do you know what that is, Solyndra?

Stewart: Yes, I do.

O'Reilly: How much money was wasted there? Do you know?

Stewart: $500 million.

O'Reilly: $528 million.

Stewart: Okay.

O'Reilly: Okay, $528 million. So, if you clean it up, if you stop wasting it, then you come to the "job creators" [gestures to himself and Jon Stewart], and we'll help you out.

Stewart: Let me just, very quickly: Solyndra was an investment the government made — the Department of Energy, I think, of $10 billion or $20 billion — in new energy technologies, Solyndra being one of them —

O'Reilly: Solar panels.

Stewart: Well, that was one of them. There was also wind and nuclear. That was about 0.5% of the money that the Department of Energy spent. Are you saying that the government should no longer, in any way, subsidize new industries? Because without that, no Internet, no roads to Long Island [audience laughs] —

O'Reilly: There'll always be roads to Long Island. Now, listen —

Stewart: But that's my point! That's a very —

O'Reilly: You've got to downsize the government so they can watch what's happening and make intelligent decisions. It's insane! Right now — look, "the $16 muffin." Do we all know what the $16 muffin is, all right?

Stewart: What??

O'Reilly: [shouting] See, you don't even know what the $16 muffin is!!

Stewart: What neighborhood do you live in?? Who makes a $16 muffin??

O'Reilly: This is great! I'm glad! Look —

Stewart: All right.

O'Reilly: $16 muffin, broke the story last week on the Factor — you were otherwise occupied, making your little "wise remarks." Not reading what's happening. They had a bunch of conferences for pinheads, federal government, and they ordered 250 muffins at $16 each.

Stewart: That's a lot for a muffin.

O'Reilly: Yeah!! And you know what? I paid for the muffin!!

Stewart: I understand that.

O'Reilly: And so did you!! [vigorously jabs his right index finger at Jon Stewart]

Stewart: I can understand that. Let me — are you familiar with "Wall Street"?

O'Reilly: No.

Stewart: Because there's this idea —

O'Reilly: Is that run by the federal government?

Stewart: No, it's not.

O'Reilly: Not yet!! [repeats finger jab]

Stewart: No, it's not, but interestingly enough, they had a little problem that added up to a little more than — what's $16 times 250 muffins? — so, Capitalism also finds itself going astray sometimes and wrecking our economy. If you believe we should go back to the good "bubble and bust" days of the 1890's —

O'Reilly: I don't like the "bubble and bust" days.

Stewart: Exactly!

O'Reilly: I want efficiency and honesty in all areas.

Stewart: So you and I are agreeing here —

O'Reilly: Sympatico.

Stewart: You and I are both — you know, when you speak a foreign language [audience laughs], it is ... oddly arousing. You know — but here is my [O'Reilly leans away from Stewart] — come back, come back! — Wait, here's what I'm going to do: when he [O'Reilly] gets over his nervous feelings — here's what I'm going to say: Killing Lincoln is on the bookshelves now. Go buy this book, because this man may not do it any longer if he can't — go buy this book right now, help him feed his family. We're gonna come back with more; it'll be up on the Interwebs. Mr. Bill O'Reilly. We're comin' right back.

Transcript, Part 2

Stewart: We don't edit anything.

O'Reilly: Right.

Stewart: I just wanted to say, now, this next segment will go right to the web. Hundreds and thousands of people will see it. It's is a big break for you. A lot of people are gonna see you. [to audience] We're back with Bill O'Reilly. Here's what I want to know — because I think you and I are agreeing on principle but maybe not degrees of which. Do you think this past decade, these past 20 years, has been a good 20 years for the wealthy?

O'Reilly: Yeah, I would say a good 20 years for the wealthy, with the technological developments and things like that. Look, I don't have any sympathy for the pinheads who were stealing money and doing all the derivative selling and doing all the day trading. I don't like these people, all right? And I think there should be government watchdogs and set up rules where they can do this and can't do that.

Stewart: So, you're a Democrat?

O'Reilly: On that I am. I'm a Democrat on that.

Stewart: That's good!

O'Reilly: But my tax dollars mean something to me. I work hard for my money. All right? We've got a $14.5 trillion debt in this country. These people don't watch the money. They just bid it out because they know guys like you and me will keep payin' it, and it's got to stop. It's got to be downsized and it's got to run efficiently.

Stewart: But revenues — the big argument in this country right now, with between [sic] the Democrats and the Republicans, appears to be: the Democrats are saying we need to cut spending, but we also need to raise revenues.

O'Reilly: Raising revenue is fine, and I'm for that, but you do it in an efficient way: flat taxes, small consumption tax. We've a trillion dollars in the un—

Stewart: Small consumption — well, here's what the rest —

O'Reilly: Wait, wait. We've a trillion dollars in the underground economy, people not paying any taxes at all. Your cocaine dealers, okay, these people. All right, they're not filing.

Stewart: So, you want to legalize cocaine?

O'Reilly: I want a consumption tax, so when they buy their Bentleys they pay 2% or 3%, so we get something from everybody. It's $1 trillion. You put that in, you bring all the income tax rates down.

Stewart: So, the debt crisis in America is caused by renegade cocaine dealers who are avoiding their social responsibilities. Bill, here is my point to you: every Republican candidate for President, the people that want to be the tentpost for that party, were offered a choice on the debate stage: $10 for $1 of revenue increase in the form of taxes. Every single one of them said no. Say right now that that is incredibly irresponsible and you could never support someone who's that — if I may borrow the term — pinheaded.

O'Reilly: Okay, look. I'm not going to generalize about anything. Herman Cain —

Stewart: That's not general! That's not general! That's specific!

O'Reilly: That's a total distortion.

Stewart: I'm telling you specifically what they said!

O'Reilly: Herman Cain wants to put a 9% national sales tax —

Stewart: All right.

O'Reilly: — and bring everybody's down. They all have their little things they want to do. I want to raise revenue because the government needs revenue to protect you from me, okay?

Stewart: Wait — what??

O'Reilly: Has to have that.

Stewart: You mean, like, Jews getting in your club?? What are you saying? What are you talking about?? Protect me from you??

O'Reilly: I'm not gonna give you — I'm paying through the roof in taxes.

Stewart: You're paying less than you paid in the 90's!

O'Reilly: That's not true.

Stewart: Yes it is!!

O'Reilly: Property taxes are up —

Stewart: Oh, stop.

O'Reilly: — if you had a home, you'd know that.

Stewart: Stop. The figures: 39 —

O'Reilly: Sales taxes are up —

Stewart: The marginal tax rate was 39.6% under —

O'Reilly: And now it's 36%!

Stewart: No, it's 35% — [aside] what is it?

O'Reilly: 35½, you round it up.

Stewart: 35½%, so it's 4% less.

O'Reilly: Every other tax in the country's gone up! What's the matter with you?? Every other tax!! The sales tax, state tax —

Stewart: You aren't living in reality.

O'Reilly: Oh! Unbelievable!

Stewart: Here's the reality: the top 1% take in nearly 25% of income today —

O'Reilly: And pay how much of the tax?

Stewart: But 25 years ago —

O'Reilly: Thirty percent of it!!

Stewart: — top 1% control 40% of the wealth; 25 years ago, it was 33%. Top 1% have had incomes rise 18% over the last decade.

O'Reilly: So we should shoot them.

Stewart: I'm not saying we should shoot them, but we shouldn't act like returning to the tax rate of the 90s is class warfare on par with Lenin and Marx! That's what I'm sayin'. [audience cheers, Jon does victory dance] You know what it is, I'm lookin' out for the folks.

O'Reilly: You want me to reply to something or what?

Stewart: Yes!! Reply.

O'Reilly: Okay, I mean, you've bused these people in from Cuba.

Stewart: I want you to reply and then do your victory dance. All right, so what is your —

O'Reilly: I'll pay the higher tax bracket if they start to cut and watch the dough; that's fair.

Stewart: But isn't that the plan that was offered?

O'Reilly: By whom???

Stewart: I thought the President offered a plan —

O'Reilly: Mr. Solyndra??? That's who you're talkin' about???

Stewart: I'm talkin' about Mr. Solyndra.

O'Reilly: The guy who was told by his Larry Summers, "I don't think that's good, Mr. President." "Give them the $500 million!" C'mon, Stewart, wise up, man!

Stewart: So, my point is: you are on record now as saying you will go back to the Clinton-era tax rate —

O'Reilly: That's right.

Stewart: — if you get, uh, some cuts in spending —

O'Reilly: Big cuts.

Stewart: — you have a specific —

O'Reilly: 10% across the board.

Stewart: What kind of idiot?? 10% across the board?? You're not even gonna look?? You're just like, it's a piñata. You know what, I need to lose 10% of my weight; you know what, I'll just cut off a leg — why not?

O'Reilly: That's ridiculous!

Stewart: Because you have to look specifically at what we need and what we don't. You can't just cut 10%.

O'Reilly: Sure you can!!!

Stewart: Oh, for God's sake!

O'Reilly: It's bloated all over the place! Knock out the muffins, first of all.

Stewart: You have the freakiest breakfast fixation I have ever .... All right, well, I, okay, we've come to a conclusion. So you're going to tell the knuckleheads over where you work to knock off the whole "Job creators are being punished, and why punish the successful?" You're going to tell them to knock that off, because that's ridiculous, because they should pay the fair share, they've had a great decade, they've had a great ride, now it's time, we're a society, let's all come together, shared sacrifice, and get this done.

O'Reilly: Everybody has to sacrifice, I'll agree with that. Everybody has to make some concessions.

Stewart: All right, you're a good man, then.

O'Reilly: All right.

Stewart: The book — what's the book called? The book is called Killing Lincoln — I'm not gonna give away the ending [audience laughs], but it will shock you. You need to get it. Bill O'Reilly, thanks for coming by.

O'Reilly: All right, Jon, always good to see you.

Transcript: Jon Stewart's rap about Fox News

2011-05-19T23:25:00.000-07:00

I only just saw last Wednesday's Daily Show, with Jon Stewart's slam of the Fox News coverage of the invitation for the rapper Common to perform at the White House. Since I didn't find this gem transcribed, here's the conclusion:
Yeah, yeah, this goes out to Fox News and all the pundits I address on tonight's show:

Yo, Fox, you create shocks, with no awe,
You dress like eagles,
But squawk like chickenhawks.
You're pigeons, on a statue,
Leaving little puddles of lie behind you.

Goin' after Obama,
A week after killin' Osama,
Creatin' drama,
Let me put in a comma,
A pause, because —
... I ... need ... a minute ... to think of
what to say, next, that would rhyme ...

You push bullshit!
The kind you find
Fall from a schnauzer's behind —
Have you lost your damned mind?
You got lazy, it's crazy,
Even Glenn Beck's leavin',
Cuz he thinks you're fergazy.

You still got Gretchen [Carlson] — she's fetchin',
But the truth that you're stretchin'
Leaves me retchin',
I'm not kvetchin' —
(Am I kvetching??) —

[Sean] Hannity, Hannity, yo, Hannity:
Straight-up insanity,
Hey, Homes, let me take a momes,
To pour one out,
For Alan mother-fuckin' Colmes.

O'Reilly? Oh, really??
I know that you feel me,
Cuz I jokes to the folks
While you choke on that smoke.

Are you toke–ing — on weed??
That you got from [Brian] Kilmeade?
To push screed that misleads,
To plant seeds of mistrust,
That Miss Greta van Sust—
... —ternenenenan just ran
On her show?? A night ago??
Cuz Megyn Kelly said so?

And you know I'm about to go,
So I'm tellin' yo' ass, yo:
Y'all blow!
— Stew Beef out!!

Video links:

Daily Show, 2011-05-11, part 1
Daily Show, 2011-05-11, part 2 (including the rap)
Jon Stewart on The O'Reilly Factor

David Barton on The Daily Show: full transcript and videos

2011-05-06T23:12:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart on Wednesday (2011-05-04) had one of his most controversial guests ever, David Barton, a fundamentalist Christian who is trying to reclaim some of the "forgotten" history of the United States, and pass along that message to children through their textbooks and curricula. Barton is the darling of the Fox News crowd, and highly praised by the likes of Mike Huckabee and Michele Bachmann, but much less highly regarded by history scholars — people with actual advanced degrees in history — and many educators. The interview as aired on Wednesday's program is about 8 minutes, but the entire interview is available through TheDailyShow.com; the embedded video clips and the full transcript, followed by some commentary and links to sites debunking Barton's historical narrative, appear below the fold. The full interview is broken into five segments, and totals about 40 minutes.

Comedy Central/Comedy Partners owns the copyright to this material, which is presented here under "Fair Use" in the interest of furthering political discourse.

The Daily Show - David Barton Pt. 1
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show - David Barton Pt. 2
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show - Exclusive - David Barton Extended Interview Pt. 1
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show - Exclusive - David Barton Extended Interview Pt. 2
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show - Exclusive - David Barton Extended Interview Pt. 3
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

[video segment "David Barton Pt. 1"]

Jon Stewart: My guest tonight, an American historian and the founder and president of Wallbuilders, please welcome to the program David Barton.

Sir! Thank you for joining us. I appreciate it. Sit. Thank you for being here.

David Barton: My pleasure, bro.

Stewart: So, here's what happened. So we have Mike Huckabee on the show.

Barton: Right. Good Guy.

Stewart: Very nice guy, good friend of the show; we always have really interesting conversations. So, I'm watching him praise you — he was at a conference and he said David Barton is the greatest historian in America and all children should have to learn from him in their curriculum. (I'm paraphrasing.) And I thought to myself, well, Jeez, I'd like to meet the greatest historian in America who all children should have to learn from, and then I started looking up your stuff and I thought, well, okay, now —

Barton: Dangerous thing to do.

Stewart: — now, this seems odd. This seems odd. And so I asked Mike Huckabee about some of the things that you've said, and he said, "Why don't you ask David Barton himself?" and I said, "Uh, okay."

Barton: And here I am.

Stewart: And so here you are. So, let me ask you — just for our audience that is not familiar with what you do — how would you describe what it is you do?

Barton: I'd say historical reclamation. We, in our company, have about 100,000 documents from before 1812, so documents out of black history, out of religious history, out of constitutional history; you name it. We've got 100,000 originals, so that's what we take a lot of history back to is those original things that happened.

Stewart: And — but it always seems that the history that you take comes back to the idea that we are a more Christian nation than we are living. Is that the —

Barton: No, I would say that's not accurate.

Stewart: Okay.

Barton: Now, there's people who point that out, but again, let me give you a good example. I was appointed in Texas as one of the experts to do the history and government standards there —

Stewart: So, you are a curriculum authority?

Barton: For about 20 years, California, Texas, all these states, I do their history and social studies standards, and so I'm asked by the state, by the governor or by the state board of education to do that.

Stewart: But you are — and this may be a misconception — but you are not a historian like in terms of academic historian. You don't have a doctorate in that.

Barton: No, don't have a doctorate in that, no. I've got all the documents, and that's what's been a lot of fun, because I went through history and school and a lot of what I got taught and what I see in the actual documents aren't the same thing, and that's what got me started. I came to some really old documents, and they contradicted what my schoolbooks said, and so what we do now is we say, "All right, publishers: here's what the actual documents are. Print the documents, go back to the originals." And on the issue of religion, being one of the guys appointed in Texas, all my reviews are online [here and here (PDFs)], so there's 43,000 words online of my reviews of the last set of standards — only two subjects do I ever mention Christianity, two issues. One was the teachers recommended taking the study of Christmas out as a holiday. So —

Stewart: You're saying that you are not interested in this —

Barton: Oh, I am. I am. As an emphasis, no, no, no.

Stewart: That is your almost total emphasis.

Barton: No, it's not.

Stewart: Oh.

Barton: See, a good example is — see, I know the kind of people who go after me, and when I was on the Texas board, there was a group that did a press release, and all of a sudden MSNBC and the Times and all these other, "Barton's crammin' Christianity down their throats in Texas!" — no, there's 43,000 words, there's two references to Christianity in 43,000 words; that's not a super-big emphasis. Now, not that that's not important to me, but what I teach —

Stewart: Well, I would say, I mean, in Leviticus, you know, being gay is mentioned twice, but people on the Right kind of make a big emphasis out of that, so —

Barton: Well, that's not a history issue. That's not a history issue.

Stewart: Well, no, but I'm just saying that I don't know that two mentions —

Barton: Let me give you another way of looking at it.

Stewart: Please.

Barton: In having done history standards before, publishers come to me and say, "All right, you helped to write the standards, help us do the textbooks." And I understand what my name evokes, so I told the publishers, "Okay, I'll be the editor, but just don't put my name on the textbook. Just leave it off." That textbook that I edited is now the best-selling public-school textbook in America, so historians across the board think it's a great book, they just don't know that I did it.

Stewart: Well, not historians, but I mean —

Barton: Teachers —

Stewart: — when Texas makes a curriculum book, it goes out — I don't think it's a free market thing, I think it just goes out to schools.

Barton: No, it was a free market thing, because I worked with the publishers, not the standards in Texas. So, I went to the publishers — or the publishers went to me — and so —

Stewart: Well, if more people are buying it, then it's clearly better.

Barton: And see, that's what they're doing. Well, yes, exactly. Exactly, but —

Stewart: I think the makers of crack might have something to say about that.

[video segment "David Barton Pt. 2"]

Stewart: Let's get to — because I do, you know — you are an important figure. You go in, you argue in front of the Supreme Court, you go in and you work with our Congress, you work with Congresspeople, you go in and you write curriculum, and I can't help but think that — and in your writings you talk about "reclaiming our forgotten history" —

Barton: Right.

Stewart: — when it seems to me, someone who probably has a very different perspective on this nation's history, that you are rewriting more than reclaiming —

Barton: Let me give a shot. Let me give a shot at that. One of the things I'm really proud about that we got done in Texas is we took the number of minorities who are covered in the standards from 9% to 25%. The way I did it: I said, "Hey, we're not covering any of the Jewish Founding Fathers. We're also not covering the black Founding Fathers — those elected to office, those who were military heroes. We're also not covering the women of the Revolution. We're also not covering Hispanics in the Revolution." That's forgotten history. I'll bet you most Jewish people can't name the Jewish Founding Fathers, most black people can't name the black Founding Fathers —

Stewart: No, I can: Sandy Koufax.

Barton: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Stewart: Yeah, you're right: Sandy Koufax; that's all I got.

Barton: Exactly.

Stewart: So, would you say — so, I am incorrect in saying that you would — because I've seen tapes of you speaking, where you make policy recommendations based on the Bible. Things like "I would like to see the capital gains tax and the estate tax gone because the Bible says so."

Barton: That's right, but those are also speeches given to groups of ministers, and I'm speaking to ministers. That's not a textbook setting; that's a whole different setting. What I'll — see, for example —

Stewart: So, you're saying there is a "wall of separation" —

Barton: Well, there is, but see, you gotta understand where that came from, too. No problem with that.

Stewart: No, a "wall of separation" within you of church and state.

Barton: Uh, no, no. Any more than the Founders wanted. Now, what they wanted was separation of the institutions, never separation of the influence. I mean, they never at any point said, "Hey, God" [gestures, sweeping God to the side] —

Stewart: Well, now we're sort of where the rubber meets the road, here, because that is kind of what I'm getting to, as much as you might protest that your main thrust is not to get us back to this idea that the Founders didn't want religion separated from the State, the documents that you pull — going off the Constitution, it doesn't mention the Creator, it doesn't mention Jesus, it doesn't mention praying in any way, so, wouldn't they be explicit in the mention of religion, if they had wanted it so? Because they were not coy people, for the most part.

Barton: No, they were not coy, and they were very blunt, and because they were, when you read the Federalist Papers, it said religion belongs to the states. Now, you read the state constitutions, they're extremely graphic on religion, but there are seven references in the Constitution to religion, whether it be Article VII — and by the way, the Declaration is incorporated into the Constitution in Article VII, so that's four references to God, just in Article VII.

[editor's note: It appears that Barton was referring to Article VI, not Article VII, although neither article incorporates the Declaration of Independence.]

Stewart: References to God are very different than explicit — like, I mean, they were so explicit in their usage: if you wanted to hold this office, you had to be this age; black people counted for three-fifths — I mean, they used fractions!

Barton: Federal office, that's — but that's holding federal office, that's not —

Stewart: But they didn't even say — I mean, there is the oath of office for the President is transcribed word-for-word in the Constitution —

Barton: That's right.

Stewart: — but they don't say you have to do it on a Bible and they don't mention —

Barton: That's right.

Stewart: — they don't mention God.

Barton: But the state laws in all 13 states required every oath to be done on a Bible and mention God.

Stewart: But only three of them actually were still there. That litmus test was only there — when the Bill of Rights came into effect, only three states still had those laws, and the Founders had been trying to phase that out.

Barton: Let's take the religion side for a minute, because when you take the First Amendment, it says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Now, one of the cases we did at the U.S. Supreme Court —

Stewart: Right.

Barton: — was Rabbi Leslie Gutterman [Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992)], who was asked in Providence, Rhode Island, to give a prayer at a graduation, and he wasn't allowed to. Now, tell me how "Congress shall make no law" means that a rabbi can't say the word God at a prayer. That's a pretty strange parsing of the Constitution, and that's what I argue, is "Congress shall make no law" is a restriction on Congress. It's not a restriction on the rights of people to say the word God in public.

Stewart: Well, there have been, I think, though, a lot of instances — [aside] Do we have to go, on the thing? Dammit! Can we go and then come back — [to Barton] do you mind sticking around for a little bit?

Barton: Happy to, happy to, happy to.

Stewart: Because this is the kind of conversation that I don't get, so I'm gonna come back with it. Uh, David Barton.

[end of broadcast portion of interview]

[video segment "David Barton Extended Interview Pt. 1"]

Stewart: But that, again, gets to, sort of back to the original point, which is the case of Guttesman [sic] in Rhode Island and the prayer: Why didn't the Founders okay a litmus test to hold office — of religion — if they wanted us to be a Christian-infused (or Bible-infused) nation?

Barton: Well, now, you've got something else. How do you define Christian nation?

Stewart: I would assume that you would do it as following the laws of —

Barton: No, never been the definition.

Stewart: Oh; what is the definition?

Barton: There's 300 court cases that declare America to be a Christian nation. Not once have we ever said you have to be a Christian or you can't be this religion. Every — and great definition by U.S. Supreme Court is —

Stewart: So, we are defined as a Christian nation, is what you're saying?

Barton: Three hundred times by the courts. Now, there's a reason they said that, because we've had twenty-something religions in America since the American Revolution — you know, I mean, real simple stuff.

Stewart: So, we're a Christian nation? By definition?

Barton: Take the right definition. Not the way it's used in the last 20 years.

Stewart: Ah.

Barton: The court definition is a nation whose institutions and cultures have been shaped by the influence of Christianity. It's hard to say that hasn't happened in America.

Stewart: Now, when you say that's in court cases, in what context?

Barton: U.S. Supreme Court — well, there's several. There was a whole series of cases that debated things about religion, there've always been people who didn't want religion in public, and the courts have said, "Nah, you can't do that." Until 1947, every time they used Thomas Jefferson's "separation of Church and State" phrase —

Stewart: Mmm-hmm.

Barton: — it was to keep religion in public, because they said "separation of Church and State" means the government can't stop religious exercise. In 1947 [Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1], Justice Hugo Black wrote a decision for the Court that said, "No, no, no. Jefferson got it all wrong. Separation —"

Stewart: So, we are all mistaken, that prayer should be in school?

Barton: I don't know we're mistaken, but we have reversed policy since 1947. So, what we had for 150 years and what we had for 50 years are two different things.

Stewart: Well, why did we have for 150 years that on our coins and things was E Pluribus Unum and not In God We Trust? Why did we change that in the 50's with Eisenhower?

Barton: Because it was on a lot of the states. Now wait a minute, it wasn't in the 50's, we changed it before that. [In 1863] '63, Lincoln put it on the coins; we didn't have paper currency.

Stewart: On the coins, yeah, but not in the Pledge [of Allegiance].

Barton: The currency they added in [1864] '64 and I think Eisenhower did six things in the [1950's] 50's that way.

Stewart: But your basic point is, we are a Christian nation, as defined by —

Barton: The influence.

Stewart: — that influence.

Barton: Not exclusivity at all.

Stewart: But who is defining Christianity's "influence," and who is saying that we are not influenced?

Barton: Oh, there's a lot saying we're not influenced. The cases I get involved with — we've got a case going right now —

Stewart: But who would bring a case saying that, "I would like to adjudicate that this country is influenced by Christianity"? In what context would that —

Barton: It goes the other way. They bring a case saying there's never been a religious influence in American history; therefore — in the case we've got now, out of New Hampshire — you can't have "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance because there's no history of religion in America. We say, "Wait a minute — time out — there is." So —

Stewart: But isn't the argument not that there's no history of religion in America, but that by explicitly putting religion in the Pledge it goes against the minority rights to protect against the establishment of religion?

Barton: No, no, because there's no coercion involved. Ever since the Pledge has been done —

Stewart: Wouldn't coercion, though, not necessarily be legal, but sometimes, perhaps, peer — like, if you're — if everybody prays and you don't want to pray, 30 people praying, one person not — can that be considered coercion?

Barton: Hey, I'm a Republican, I'm in New York City, I've got coercion all around me. I have to live with that sometimes. There's coercion; you have to put on your big-boy pants and do some things. As long as you're not being forced to do it —

Stewart: But you are being forced to be in school.

Barton: Look at all the pressure that goes through school, whether it's drugs or anything else, and we don't rule that unconstitutional.

Stewart: Well, no, because there's not the teacher saying, "You have to smoke pot."

Barton: But you do have — see, that's why we've always had the right of conscience, always protected. That's why Jehovah's Witnesses, from the very beginning in '47 —

Stewart: But there's the right of conscience and the reality of conscience, and don't these laws exist to protect the right and the reality of conscience?

Barton: Now, laws exist to protect actual offenses; you have to be able to show that you've suffered an actual injury to even be able to get into court. You have to show an injury in fact, not a perceived injury, and the fact that it might make me feel uncomfortable is not enough to keep everyone else from practicing their faith, just because I'm uncomfortable with the way they do it.

Stewart: Actually, I think that might be. I think, actually, that is, isn't it?

Barton: It has become that. It's become that. But it should never — I mean, here's a great example —

Stewart: Well, why shouldn't it be?

Barton: Minnesota. We got a state employee in Minnesota. He cannot park his car in the state employee parking lot because it has a religious bumper sticker on his car, so, why not?

Stewart: We can all pick anecdotal cases of ridiculousness, of overreaching in terms of tolerance and all that, but getting back to the larger issue, which is, you seem to argue for a Biblical or religious founding of our nation that the evidence doesn't seem — I guess it doesn't seem to be convincing to me, because the Founders could've put it explicitly in the Constitution and didn't. And I'm still waiting for the idea of, so why do we have to dig around to these other documents when we have the Constitution?

Barton: It's fairly easy, because, when you have — like we do — 100,000 documents, it's so permeated. It's like, we don't put a law that says gravity pulls things from top to center. Everybody knows that. It was the atmosphere.

Stewart: No, we do — but it is — if we were writing a book about being on earth, we would put that law first.

Barton: But that's not what these guys did. Yeah, we would.

Stewart: Right. Because it's one of the basic —

Barton: But that's not what they did.

Stewart: — you know, laws of thermodynamics. I mean, that is what you would put.

Barton: See, you gotta look at —

Stewart: Why would you not list the basic laws of Christian nation when you're making a document that is the thing that all of our political leaders have to uphold and protect??

Barton: Couple things. You've taken the definition of Christian nation now and taken it back 200 years; that was not the definition they used.

Stewart: Actually, I think the reverse: I think you're taking the definition of Christian nation now and putting it back on what they are. They were certainly — I'm not saying they're not religious people —

Barton: Sure.

Stewart: — but that argument was had. The anti-Federalists — Patrick Henry, Founding Father, would've preferred a theocracy, or some type of more Calvinist approach. He had the argument. The Federalists, who were working off of maybe a more Enlightenment type of model, won. And it's not that they didn't have the argument; they did have the argument. Patrick Henry would've liked to have had a litmus test for public office of religion, he would've liked to have —

Barton: He didn't win. He didn't win.

Stewart: Right.

Barton: Now, take the Federalist Papers. Three Federalist Papers —

Stewart: Take the Constitution!

Barton: You brought the Federalist Papers —

Stewart: No, I brought the Federalist — I bring it up only in the sense of, this argument was had, and the idea of —

Barton: Where in the Constitution is there anything hostile to religion? And that's the argument we're having. See, why does the Constitution create a hostility toward — Now, here's what I told —

Stewart: Are you really — and this is, I think, where I get to something that's more difficult to take — you believe there's a hostility —

Barton: Oh, Jon.

Stewart: — to Christianity.

Barton: You would not believe the number of arrest cases in the last year of Christians — a 67-year-old man in Georgia who gave out a gospel tract to somebody on a park bench, two days in jail.

Stewart: I think there is real persecution of Christians.

Barton: There is some.

Stewart: I think it happens in China, but I don't think it happens in this country!

Barton: No, but how do you keep it from becoming like anywhere else? You stop it right when it happens.

Stewart: Because we've had 240 years of evidence that it won't. One of the reasons that we separated it from the public square is to avoid these types of situations.

Barton: But here's a case we're working on right now: a pastor in Kansas just got arrested —

Stewart: You may be right, about this case, but I am talking about the larger picture of, there's an idea that the Founders wanted this to be a specifically divinity, American exceptionalism —

Barton: That's not the argument.

Stewart: What is the argument, then?

Barton: The argument is they did not require a secular society. Now, let me throw out another piece —

Stewart: We're not a secular society! There's churches all over this country!

Barton: But are there people trying to make us a secular society in court? Yes. These are the cases I deal with all the time in court.

Stewart: In schools, they don't want prayer and the Ten Commandments, but the idea that Christianity, as a religion in this country, is threatened, really is ludicrous! As a Jew, I can tell you, Christians have it made. You get — let me just tell you this — you get presents for Christ's birth; when he dies, you get a basket of candy — you can't lose!

[video segment "David Barton Extended Interview Pt. 2"]

Stewart: All I'm saying is, Let's be realistic about what this country really is. We are a Christian-dominated society —

Barton: Sure.

Stewart: — but through the Founders' wisdom, we have kept that from becoming a state religion —

Barton: Exactly!

Stewart: — so that their vision of "all people are created equal" —

Barton: Exactly.

Stewart: — could flourish in a —

Barton: That's a Biblical vision, by the way: that all men are created equal. You don't get that from a secular world.

Stewart: I think that that's not — you saying that —

Barton: France didn't believe that.

Stewart: Well, we thought that France did for a little while, but you know, the idea that secular is purely bad and religion is purely good, I think, is why we need to keep that line from it getting in there. You know, I'm all for, if people use their religion to find morality, that's wonderful.

Barton: You bet.

Stewart: But it's not the only path.

Barton: You bet. Thomas Paine proves that.

Stewart: There's a lot of people who quit drinkin', they were alcoholics, 'cause they woke up and found Jesus. There's just as many people who woke up and said, "I don't like sleeping in my own vomit."

Barton: And it works.

Stewart: So — exactly!

Barton: But let me give you an example —

Stewart: It wouldn't work if we brought a majority rule into the public square of religious —

Barton: That's why it's an inalienable right, because majority has nothing to do. An inalienable right, by the way, the guys who wrote the Constitution said that's a God-given right. That's the right of conscience. You have the right to worship according to the dictates of conscience, regardless of what the majority says.

Stewart: That's right.

Barton: There's no problem with that. So, now here's my question: the case we just dealt with, just a week ago, we're coming up with a National Day of Prayer. We've been doing this for 200 years. We have a court case [FFRF v. Obama, 08-cv-588-bbc] that says nobody is allowed to celebrate on the National Day of Prayer. Freedom From Religion Foundation, we fought this thing all the way through, we won it. Why would people want to tell me I can't pray if I want to? This is not a government activity, this is a private activity.

Stewart: And they lost.

Barton: They did. But we had to fight the case.

Stewart: You can't prevent — you know, there was a woman at McDonald's, she spilled coffee on her lap and sued them because it was hot! [Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, 1994]

Barton: She got $3 million, though. She won!

Stewart: Right. I'm just sayin', though — believe me, we are not arguing that America doesn't have some asinine people in it.

Barton: And that's why we go to court to defend this stuff.

Stewart: But on the flip side of that — I can understand — you know, you have gone and testified that Jesus is against the inheritance tax —

Barton: No, I haven't. Nope.

Stewart: You haven't said Jesus is against the —

Barton: I've never testified that.

Stewart: Not testified, not testified, you have spoken in front of groups.

Barton: In front of pastors, and what I did was, I quoted the 1765 sermon given by a pastor that John Adams praised, where he talked about the taxes that were good and bad.

Stewart: Well, can you understand people being uncomfortable? You are —

Barton: If they take a line out of it, you bet.

Stewart: For a Creationist — and I'm assuming —

Barton: Me? Sure.

Stewart: Okay.

Barton: I believe in the declaration. I believe in the declaration.

Stewart: So, for a Creationist, it's interesting, because you are almost the missing link, if you will, between theology and, sort of, activism politically, and I think that's where people's discomfort comes in, is when political leaders — your views are your views —

Barton: Sure.

Stewart: — and, you know, I say, "God bless you!" to people when they sneeze; that doesn't mean I'm a Creationist. It just means —

Barton: Sure.

Stewart: — it's a nice thing to say. You seem to be taking your religious views, channeling them through a sort of a faux-scientific or historical method, for use in political and curriculum activities, and that's where I think it creates some trouble.

Barton: No, because, going back to curriculum: one of the things I teach teachers, and I show state legislatures testifying, is if you're going to teach history, there's 17 to 18 different strands you have to teach of history. You have to cover civil rights history, military history, community history; you have to cover economic history; you have to cover religious history; you have to cover all of it. Now, what happens is, people look at me and they pick out one of those 17 strands and say, "Oh, look what he says!" I've got all these other strands, too; I've got the economic history, I've got the civil rights history, you know, I go through that. So, what happens is —

Stewart: But you can understand, if a person — let me just take it on the flip side — if somebody says, like, you know, "Listen, I give a lot of speeches where I'm just talking about that, and I happen to give speeches to one group where I say things that are really out there...." It's like, "Six days a week, I go to work and I do a thing, and on Sundays, I wear a diaper and I walk around the city."

Barton: Whatever.

Stewart: "And everybody seems to focus on the "diaper around the city" part, and yet forgets that, during the week, I'm a salesperson with Prudential." Like, it's, you know, I don't think that's a fair thing to say that, you know, they forget about these other 16, because that 17th is pretty explosive to a good portion of the country.

Barton: But, you know, you've brought the minimum wage and the capital gains tax; all right, listen to the full one-hour speech, listen to the 1765 sermon that I'm talking about from Charles Chauncy that John Adams quoted, and then put it in that context. So, is Barton talking about a historical document here, an approach that was used 200 years ago, informing taxes —

Stewart: Right.

Barton: — or is he talking something — and see, that's what never comes out.

Stewart: Okay, maybe here's the problem here. You're a theologian and historian, and people have confused what hat you're wearing when —

Barton: I would say that's fair. I'd say that's fair.

Stewart: So that's — the issue has been that you are promoting theology with these things, but would you also say it's fair that through your theology promotion, that is what you're known for in these circles politically?

Barton: Only when they pull out that — no, not politically. Not in political circles. No.

Stewart: Well, let me ask you this: who's asking you, in Congress, to come help them? Michele Bachmann (R–MN)?

Barton: No, both Democrats and Republicans.

Stewart: What Democrats?

Barton: I don't give names unless they give names. You know about Michele because she's used my name. There's dozens of Congressmen that we help, and I don't use their names unless they bring 'em out. Now, there's Democrats and Republicans, both, just like there's Democrat and Republican governors, both, just like in campaigns, I endorse both Democrats and Republicans on the basis of their ideas.

Stewart: But the Democrats won't mention your name?

Barton: By and large, they won't.

Stewart: You're their pot dealer, and they don't wanna — ?

Barton: That's right. That's right. And a lot of the Republicans won't mention my name, either.

Stewart: How does that make you feel?? You've got these guys, you're helpin' 'em, and they win a campaign, and you're like the guy in the corner, like: "I helped you, you son of a ...!"

Barton: Well, it's like that textbook, you know. I told 'em, keep my name out as editor. As long as the textbook sells and kids get good information, I don't care if my name is there. It doesn't matter to me. And if I get information that'll help a Congressman, I don't care if they use my name. That's not my deal. I just want 'em to have good information. So if I can — and I tell you what is kinda fun is, you find out I got a call from three Congressmen off the floor, and they said, "Hey, anything in history about bailout and stimulus plans in Congress?" It turns out, in 1792 there was a big debate in Congress over bailout and stimulus plans. So we said, "Yeah, here's what James Madison said." We get calls all the time on all sorts of issues, and if I can get them information that will help them, that's what I want to do. And I don't ask them to use my name, and I don't care if they do.

Stewart: Do you ever give them information that runs counter to this country being a more Christian-founded country than — you know, in terms of — because, in some respects, it reminds me of [pause] the Iraq War, God help me, for the idea that we had an idea about going in and then we turned around and found good reasons to do it. And that's, you know, the troubling aspect of it is, it feels like a —

Barton: But it's not a "pick and choose." And see, that's one of the things — what we do, is we collect all the quotes that have to do with a topic.

Stewart: It has to be a "pick and choose," because history is contradictory. I mean, you can't say, "Jefferson was..." because people contradicted themselves.

Barton: Let me give you an example: I've got —

Stewart: And the Bible contradicts itself.

Barton: Well, I've got a book that I've done called Original Intents; 1700 footnotes in it, they go back to founding documents.

Stewart: Right.

Barton: On the other side, there's a book done by two professors called The Godless Constitution, PhD's at Cornell. The footnote page, they said, "We have dispensed with the usual scholarly apparatus of footnotes." Not a footnote in the book. I got 1700, they got one — I mean, they got zero. So there's —

Stewart: But you're not arguing the idea that this country was founded on non-Christian principle, like that is a pretty accepted historical narrative. It's not just like a couple of dudes from Cornell who said, "No, no, no."

Barton: The notion that we were founded without religion, doesn't exist. All the 13 charters —

Stewart: That's a false choice — I don't think anybody's suggesting religion has not been an important part of this country.

Barton: Exactly.

Stewart: But nobody's suggesting that.

Barton: Oh, yeah, they are. Yeah, they are.

Stewart: Well, the people — let me put it this way: the majority viewpoint —

Barton: The people I deal with, the professors I deal with, absolutely they do.

Stewart: But then you have a very skewed perspective on —

Barton: Because that's what I deal with.

Stewart: Right.

Barton: Now, see, another one, if you've ever seen Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America, good book, about that thick [about 4" or 10cm]. The book they use in colleges now is less than a half inch [12mm] thick. It says, "edited for the modern reader." They took out all of his references to religion, all of his references to family, and that's "the modern reader"? Now, I've got problems with that. This is the original; why not read the original? Or at least keep the tone of their — but that's what I deal with in academic universities all the time.

Stewart: Do you think people would be more comfortable with you if they felt like you were consistently looking to extend historical context and — because there are a lot of critics out there who say you cherry-pick your religious facts, take them out of context — your historical facts — to use them to bolster your argument.

Barton: They've never proven that. They've claimed that. Show me some documentation where it's taken out of context. They've never provided that. They complain about it.

Stewart: Didn't they say the John Adams quote, where you talk about, he says, "We were inspired by Divinity."

Barton: No, I don't recall him saying that. Have you got the quote?

Stewart: Yeah, let me see if I can find it. [consults notes] Okay, here it is. Here is what you wrote in your book about what Adams said, endorsing the Church being involved in the State: "The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in this earth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a sacrament can be administered, but by the Holy Ghost, who is transmitted from age to age by laying the hands of the bishop upon the heads of candidates for the ministry. [...] There is no authority, civil or religious; there can be no legitimate government, but what is administered by the Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it; all without it is rebellion and perdition, or in more orthodox words, damnation." That's the quote that you used in your book.

Barton: Now, I have the original John Adams letter with me off the set. I brought the original. See, I posted that online; how can I misquote it when I put the whole thing up there. That's the only John Adams letter in the world that he wrote on that day to that person, and that's what's in it. I posted that where everybody can see it, and that's what we do with our documents.

Stewart: But you have then the sentence after the one, which is: "Although this is all artifice and cunning —"

Barton: Oh, the entire letter is posted. The entire letter is posted.

Stewart: But you can see that the next sentence shows that he's being sarcastic in that passage.

Barton: Not in — no, not at all. You read the entire letter, Jon — now, see, they've given you their critique of it.

Stewart: But how could he say the Holy Ghost — I mean, this man was a Unitarian; why would he claim the Holy Ghost sincerely?

Barton: You know what a Unitarian was then?

Stewart: Yeah, someone who didn't believe in the Trinity.

Barton: No, no. Not until 1839, long after his death. It did not become —

Stewart: So John Adams believed in the Holy Ghost?

Barton: He believed in the Trinity, and that's where Unitarian —

Stewart: Did he believe we were a Christian nation? Because he signed the Treaty of Tripoli, and said we weren't, explicitly.

Barton: No, time out. Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11 is what you're talking about, it's 82 words long; everybody always puts a period after 17 words. There's not a period there. It says "The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion," right? That's what it says, where everybody puts a period. Now, remember: it's a negotiation he's made with a Moslem nation. He says, "The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion as having an inherent hostility towards Muslims. Hey, we're not the Europeans you guys fought in the Crusades. We don't hate you guys because you're Muslims." He didn't say we're not a Christian nation; we're not a European Christian nation that hates you and fights you because of your religion. And by the way, the State Department says there is no Article 11 in the Treaty of Tripoli. The original, it's not there. Everybody loves to quote the Treaty of Tripoli.

Stewart: So it's Photoshopped?

Barton: Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly.

Stewart: Photocalligraphied.

[video segment "David Barton Extended Interview Pt. 3"]

Stewart: But you use this quote to say that he is believing in the Holy —

Barton: No, on John Adams, I put the whole letter up there. Now, see, they've taken those parts out; I put the letter up there.

Stewart: So, you are the one using things in context?

Barton: Well, I'm tryin' to. That's why I put the whole letter up there.

Stewart: But didn't you have to print — wasn't there a whole thing where you had to print a bunch of retractions based on —

Barton: No, I never had to retract a single thing. Every quote I've used has always had a footnote to it. [audience laughs] Let me give you an example of what you're talking about.

Stewart: You're — it's — honestly, I feel like it's one of those things where it's like I received a dossier on someone and I'm looking at it and I have all these facts and all these things and I go, "You did this," and you go, "No, I never did that," and — it's like in Bewitched: remember first Darrin, second Darrin?

Barton: Yeah, yeah.

Stewart: I feel like I got all the research on the first Darrin and you're like, "I'm sorry, I'm the second Darrin."

Barton: Yeah.

Stewart: You know, but I'm always a little dubious of this idea, like, "Dude, you got me all wrong!" because, you know, the truth is, when you speak to pastors, you toe a certain line, and it's very difficult for me to imagine that when you come back to this other historical aspect, all that is forgotten.

Barton: But look at the textbooks I write. Read the textbooks. You won't find that through there. That's why they sell so well in public schools.

Stewart: Well, the curriculum fight in Texas didn't feel pleasant to me, didn't feel fair.

Barton: It didn't.

Stewart: It felt infused with a more fundamentalist view of the Bible and Christianity.

Barton: Here's what I objected to about that, because that fight in Texas was done by press releases. They issued a press release, and when they did — and, you know, as I mentioned, New York Times and MSNBC all picked up the press release — never even called me to ask about the other side.

Stewart: Well, that I don't — I mean, obviously when people are going out there, they should talk to you. I mean, that in and of itself.

Barton: See, the thing to remember is, every bit of that was online, and is still online to this day. Our entire discussions, every change we made, several hundred amendments, is online. Now, if it's so bad, how come nobody's pulled out exact quotes online? They keep talking about the "tone" we tried to inject; no!

Stewart: Right.

Barton: Look at the writings.

Stewart: So, you never claimed Congress printed an official Bible for U.S. schools in 1782?

Barton: Sure they did. And it's in the Bible itself. I have the actual Bible from 1782. It's got a Congressional endorsement in the front of the Bible; it is printed by Act of Congress. 1782, it's one of the rarest books in the world, they printed 10,000 [in] 1782, there's 28 left in the world, I've got one of 'em.

Stewart: Here's the story I heard; you tell me, then, if I'm completely wrong again, which apparently I have been this entire time. Congress didn't print the Bible; a private printer named [Robert] Aitken printed it.

Barton: He could not print it without Congressional permission.

Stewart: Well, no, apparently he printed it, and then he had a bunch, so then he petitioned Congress to certify —

Barton: No.

Stewart: — that it was accurate in 1781. Because you're telling me the facts I'm saying to you are completely wrong.

Barton: Those are wrong, because when you —

Stewart: "For the use of the schools" were not Congress's words, they were the words of Aitken, who was trying to sell his Bibles to Congress.

Barton: No.

Stewart: And you say it's in the records of Congress, but anybody who speaks to Congress or petitions them has their words in the Congressional Record. So Congress agreed to certify it as accurate, but denied his request that it be published under the authority of Congress, and they never said anything about use in schools.

Barton: It has, in the front of the Bible, a Congressional endorsement: "This Bible recommended to inhabitants of the United States by the Congress Assembled." It has a Congressional endorsement. They certify that they went through the Bible —

Stewart: They certified that it was an accurate copy, but denied that it be published under the authority of Congress.

Barton: No, the whole thing went through committees in Congress. There were committees appointed. [Congressional chaplain George] Duffield and [John] Witherspoon were on the committees, James Duane; there were committees that oversaw the whole thing all the way through. Now, Aitken is the one who printed it; no question that Aitken is the printer, and no question that he asked Congress to do it —

Stewart: Did he print it prior to asking, or — ?

Barton: No.

Stewart: So, he asked them and then he printed it?

Barton: He asked them, got their permission, then, with their oversight, going through the Bible —

Stewart: Their permission, and then they said they would verify that it's an accurate Bible?

Barton: That it's an accurate Bible, and they recommended it. And they advocated its use. As a matter of fact, they wanted Washington to give one to every soldier, but we'd won the Revolution by then, so by the time it came out, we're done with the Revolution. Washington has a letter of how I want to give this to every soldier, but the Revolution's over and they've all gone home.

Stewart: Right. But you can understand how these stories are all, you know, you're finding anecdote here, anecdote here, and ultimately what it all seems to come down to for me is, we have a founding document, the Constitution. It doesn't mention it, and —

Barton: But it doesn't exclude it, and that's where they argue, if it's not mentioned then it's excluded. And that's what I have to deal with all the time is, it doesn't have to be explicitly mentioned to not be excluded. In other words, it's an inclusive document, rather than an exclusive document. And they argue the other way. Does that make sense?

Stewart: No.

Barton: [laughs]

Stewart: Well, no. I would say that a document that says there will be no establishment of religion is an exclusive document. I mean, I do think that's exclusionary, by saying you can't establish —

Barton: That's wrong, and who can't do it? Congress.

Stewart: Did you disagree with me?

Barton: I did, several times, man. Several times. That scares ya; I know that scares ya.

Stewart: It does scare me, a little bit. So, wait —

Barton: But look at the prohibition: it's on Congress can't do it. So, to say that I can't participate in a National Day of Prayer —

Stewart: The states can't do it, either.

Barton: Yeah, and see: that was a strange twist of a court decision, because the Constitution doesn't say that.

Stewart: But they were all pretty much — the state constitutions had taken out those litmus tests by the 1800's.

Barton: No, no. Maryland had theirs until 1962. U.S. Supreme Court —

Stewart: Oh, is that true? One of them had it, I guess.

Barton: Well, several did.

Stewart: But they were down to three by the time the Bill of Rights came in.

Barton: The one in Massachusetts is still there today — to this day. The one in New Hampshire is still there, to this day.

Stewart: So, you have to, to hold office in New Hampshire —

Barton: It's not applied; it's still in their constitution.

Stewart: If it were applied, would it be legal?

Barton: The court wouldn't think so, but from a constitutional standpoint it should be, because the Constitution limits the federal government, not the states, and that's the Ninth and Tenth Amendment. So, from the standpoint of the Founding Fathers, religion was to be dealt with in the states; that's why Thomas Jefferson never gave a federal prayer proclamation. He did when he was governor of Virginia, but he didn't as President, because that was a state's issue. So, now for —

Stewart: Were the Founding Fathers — you know, the difficulty for me is, the Founding Fathers, they, I think, meant for slavery to be abolished at some point —

Barton: Exactly.

Stewart: — but they left it up to the states —

Barton: That's right.

Stewart: — to get — it struck me as what they called it, a compromise. A bargain, a terrible bargain.

Barton: Three states said, "We will not be part of this group if you don't do it."

Stewart: That's right.

Barton: So, three held ten blackmail, and, yeah. Exactly.

Stewart: Right. This strikes me as a similar idea, that the Federalists, who had wanted to remove it — because, again, they could have expressly included it, and by not, it strikes me as —

Barton: But they didn't need to. It was a jurisdictional issue. See, that's the Enumerated Powers doctrine, where if it's not there, you don't have — Congress doesn't have permission to do it.

Stewart: Right.

Barton: So, the Bill of Rights was only to limit the federal Congress, not to limit the states. It was never intended to limit the states, and it did not limit the states until well into the 20th century.

Stewart: But why would Franklin say when it was down to three, he would say this is a step in the right direction, the liberalizing of these laws? Like, you know, there's a difference between the Founding Fathers and Cotton Mather and Patrick Henry, and —

Barton: Sure.

Stewart: — I think confusing what the Puritans wanted this country to be with what this country is, I think is where people have that delineation and that problem.

Barton: There's a geographic difference. I mean, what they did in the southern states is not religiously what they did in the New England states, and what they did in the middle colonies is different from both of 'em.

Stewart: Right.

Barton: And you had all 13 of those groups coming together, meeting.

Stewart: Right. And that was the Articles of Confederation, and it didn't work, and then they got together again and formed the Constitution.

Barton: Even the Constitution, you had those geographic — slavery is a great example. You know, the northern guys, they had blacks holding office at the time, blacks voted in New England; southern guys, they're never gonna talk about blacks doing anything. The middle colonies, they wanted blacks to do that, but they've still got a lot of racism, so you've got three separate approaches to how to handle race in the Constitution.

Stewart: Sounds like Goldilocks, really, it's that same kind of —

Barton: It is, really.

Stewart: — too hot, too cold, just right. Yeah, it's nice.

Barton: Exactly. And the same with religion.

Stewart: Right.

Barton: And that's why the Constitution — both on slavery and on religion — kind of took a hands-off approach.

Stewart: Do you feel that we don't have enough religion in this country? You feel like we need more?

Barton: No. I feel that what is not justified is hostility toward religion — and again, these are the cases I deal with. I mean, on the House — on the Senate Judiciary Committee had a hearing on this, we had an 86-page document, single-spaced, of all the instances, court cases —

Stewart: Do you feel like the majority in a locality should be able to determine —

Barton: Yes. And here in New York City, there's schools that are 100% Hasidic Jewish, and I think they ought to be able to have Hasidic Jewish practices there, because all 100% of the kids are.

Stewart: So, you would allow, in, like — let's say Dearborn, Michigan, was majority Muslim —

Barton: And it is.

Stewart: — you'd be all right with Shari'a law, and the whole business?

Barton: Sure.

Stewart: Well, that's consistent.

Barton: But for somebody from the outside to come in and say, "I don't like that; you can't do it," that's what I got trouble with.

Stewart: Really? See, that strikes me as the essence of America, is that somebody from the outside of the federal government saying you can't do that.

Barton: You can't do it.

Stewart: Because, I mean, it creates a barrier to people and freedom. It creates a barrier for people going into those areas and, you know, it'd be like saying, "And you can't restrict based just on race." By establishing a religious doctrine in an area, that is setting up an exclusionary boundary and a coercion to new people coming into that area — and I think, actually, the opposite of probably what you think —

Barton: If it's coercion. If it's coercion.

Stewart: Have you ever been to a Hasidic community??

Barton: Mmm-hmm. I have.

Stewart: Try walkin' in there and goin', "Hey, everybody, it's Easter!!" Like, you're not gonna — This is — can I tell you something? — and this is what I always say to Huckabee — it's fascinating.

Barton: Good.

Stewart: Really is fascinating.

Barton: Good.

Stewart: Really?

Barton: Yeah.

Stewart: All right.

Barton: Man, debate's good.

Stewart: Do you feel like you're talking to, you know, like, a secular humanist —

Barton: No.

Stewart: — that is responsible for grave danger to this country?

Barton: No, no.

Stewart: A cancer on our society?

Barton: You know, as long as there's open conversation, that's good stuff.

Stewart: That's all I care about.

Barton: That's good stuff.

Stewart: All I care about is open conversation that leads to nothing.

Barton: Uh, yeah. We got that.

Stewart: Well, I thank you very much for being here, I really do. I appreciate it.

Barton: My pleasure.

Stewart: David Barton, everybody!

LINCOLN MADISON COMMENTS:

The United States is not now, nor has it ever been, a nation founded upon the Christian religion. The Treaty of Tripoli, discussed in the interview, was the very first treaty ever ratified by the United States Senate, and the text that was ratified by the Senate contains the "Article 11" wording that plainly and unambiguously states:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

That language was accepted by unanimous vote of the Senate and by President John Adams in 1797. The issue of whether that paragraph appears in the original Arabic text of the treaty as signed in Tripoli and Algiers is immaterial to this discussion; the clear fact of the matter is that the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to declare that the U.S. is not founded on Christianity.

Barton also raises the claim that John Adams believed in the Holy Trinity, which the historical record is clear that he did not. John Adams was a Unitarian, which does mean that he did not believe in the Trinity. The earliest use of the word "Unitarian" in print in the English language was in 1672, at which point it already clearly referred to disbelief in the Trinity. There was no magic snap of the fingers in 1839 (or any other year) in which Unitarians, having previously believed in the Trinity, suddenly ceased.

But the text Barton references, an original letter from John Adams to Benjamin Rush dated 1809-12-21, supports Jon Stewart's interpretation and refutes Barton's own claim:

But my friend there is something very serious in this business. The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in this Earth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a Sacrament can be administered but by the Holy Ghost, who is transmitted from age to age by laying the hands of the Bishop on the heads of candidates for the Ministry. In the same manner as the Holy Ghost is transmitted from monarch to monarch by the holy oil in the vial at Rheims which was brought down from Heaven by a dove and by that other phial [vial] which I have seen in the Tower of London. There is no authority civil or religious: There can be no legitimate government but what is administered by this Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it. All without it is rebellion and perdition, or in more orthodox words damnation. Although this is all artifice and cunning in the secret original in the heart, yet they all believe it so sincerely that they would lie down their lives under the ax or the fiery fagots [wood used for burning individuals at the stake] for it. Alas, the poor weak ignorant dupe human nature. There is so much king craft, priest craft, gentlemen’s craft, people’s craft, doctors craft, lawyers craft, merchants craft, tradesmen’s craft, laborers craft and Devil’s craft in the world that it seems a desperate and impractical project to undeceive it.

The portion highlighted in red was elided from the quote Jon Stewart read from Barton's book, but it clearly casts doubt on Barton's interpretation. Are we to believe that John Adams believed that the authority of the French and English monarchies legitimately flowed from the anointing oil as a means of passing forward the infusion of the Holy Ghost? And are we then to ignore the last third of the paragraph, which overflows with Adams' sarcasm?

Barton claims that Article VII of the Constitution refers to God, and incorporates the Declaration of Independence, bringing in three additional references to God. First of all, Article VII says that the Constitution shall enter into force when ratified by nine of the thirteen states; it makes no reference at all to God or religion or the Declaration of Independence. Presumably Barton meant to say Article VI, which says:

All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

The only reference to God or religion is in a negative sense: "no religious test shall ever be required...." As to incorporating the Declaration of Independence, that would have to be from the first sentence, but, seeing as the Declaration itself neither contracted any debts nor entered into any engagements, it's more than a stretch to say it's incorporated.

Barton also ridiculously mischaracterizes his opponents in the court cases he cites. In the case of Lee v. Weisman, where the rabbi gave a prayer at a public-school graduation ceremony, Barton gets his facts badly wrong. First of all, Rabbi Gutterman did give the prayer; after the fact, the Supreme Court ruled against the principal of the school, but based in part on the fact that the principal gave the rabbi a pamphlet with guidelines for what should and should not be included in the prayer. In other words, it was precisely the fact that an agent of the government (the principal) was telling someone how he could pray that was the problem. Furthermore, the fact that the prayer was offered at an official school function — even though it was an "optional" function — introduced an element of religious coercion to the students.

The case of Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Obama, Barton gets even more badly wrong, which is particularly damning, since it is a current case in which he is directly involved. Barton says that the FFRF wants to prevent anyone from having a private celebration of a National Day of Prayer, but that is an outright lie. What the FFRF sought, and what the trial judge granted, was an injunction against the Congress and the President from issuing an official governmental proclamation for the NDOP. Any private group is perfectly free to declare a National Day of Prayer, but neither the Congress nor the President should give it the government stamp of approval, because that is precisely an establishment of religion. It is precisely the fact that it is a government activity — despite Barton's absurd claim to the contrary — that is the problem. Also, Barton and friends haven't won yet; the case is still on appeal.

Going back into history, Barton also completely mischaracterizes the case of Everson v. Board of Education, the 1947 decision written by Justice Hugo Black. Justice Black didn't say that Jefferson got it all wrong, he based his opinion precisely on Jefferson's view of the First Amendment. Quoting Justice Black:

The 'establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect "a wall of separation between Church and State."

Likewise, the New Hampshire case regarding the Pledge of Allegiance (FFRF v. Hanover) does not claim anything remotely similar to "there's never been a religious influence in American history," as Barton claims. It simply seeks to end one particular instance of the preference by the government of religion over non-belief. The case doesn't claim that there has been no religious influence; rather, it seeks to at long last take the government's thumb off the scales.

Barton also gets wrong the history of state constitutional provisions about religion. The clause in the Maryland constitution requiring profession of belief in God is still there, even today, despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court in 1961 unanimously ruled its application to be illegal [Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488]. The state of Maryland added a fig leaf in the form of the annotation "Nothing in this article [Article 36] shall constitute an establishment of religion." The Texas state constitution contains a similar inoperative provision, as do several other states, but the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land.

As for the case of the Minnesota state worker with a religious bumper sticker, no one seems to have any idea what Barton was talking about at all; no such case comes up on Google under several different combinations of keywords.

The story of the Aitken Bible brings forth yet more distortions from Mr. Barton. First, a bit of context: the Constitution was written in 1787 and went into effect in 1789, so we are talking here about the Continental Congress, operating under the Articles of Confederation, with the Bill of Rights not yet written. However, Barton's claim that Robert Aitken "could not print it without Congressional permission" is absurd on its face. The only thing that Congress "authorized" Aitken to publish was its conclusion that his Bible was accurate. The exact text of the Congressional resolution is:

Resolved, That the United States in Congress assembled highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitkin [sic], as subservient to the interest of religion as well as an instance of the progress of arts in this country, and being satisfied from the above report, of his care and accuracy in the execution of the work, they recommend this edition of the bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorise him to publish this recommendation in the manner he shall think proper.

They did not authorize him to publish the Bible; they authorized him to publish their recommendation of it. As the Library of Congress says on their website, "This resolution was a result of Aitken's successful accomplishment of his project" — not a precondition, as Barton would have us believe. Also, giving the Bible to the soldiers was a suggestion made to General Washington, who said, in effect, "Gosh, that would've been nice, but it's too late now." It's also worth noting that Aitken lost a lot of money on the project because — even with no competition at all — he couldn't sell his print run of 10,000 copies.

Finally, a few other resources for rebuttals of some of David Barton's claims:

God Discussion
PFAW Right Wing Watch
The Public Record (Chris Rodda)
Austin American-Statesman re: Barton's curriculum recommendations

Huckabee on Daily Show: transcript and video

2011-04-06T23:59:00.000-07:00

2011-04-06: Former governor Mike Huckabee (R–AR) did an extended interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The full transcript with embedded video links follows after the fold.

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Jon Stewart: Welcome back. My guest tonight, a frequent guest, he is the former governor of Arkansas, whose book is called A Simple Government: 12 Things We Really Need from Washington and a Trillion We Don’t. Please welcome back to the program Mike Huckabee! [fanfare, Huckabee arrives] Welcome to the program again.

Mike Huckabee: Thank you.

Stewart: You — you write a book every six weeks. It’s unbelievable.

Huckabee: Well, almost. One of these days, somebody’s gonna read one of ‘em.

Stewart: Stop it! A Simple Government. First of all, the big news, obviously, where you work, Mr. Beck — Glenn Beck — has announced he’s transitioning from — I didn’t catch the end of it: I don’t know if it’s male-to-female, but he’s transitioning.

Huckabee: I’m pretty sure that’s not it.

Stewart: He’s leaving Fox News.

Huckabee: We’re not doing the daily show, is what I gather, but I also understand that he will be doing some projects. Now, everything I know, I learned because I was on WiFi on an airplane, and I was just getting it like probably you were.

Stewart: Let me ask you: will you announce right here, right now, that you will form a committee? Will you run for the 5:00 spot on Fox? Can you answer that?

Huckabee: I have an exploratory committee established for that purpose, and then we’ll move it to a thoughtful committee, and we’ll see. I don’t know. It really kind of caught me off guard because it was not something I was expecting.

Stewart: Do you think it’s a “If you love something, set it free” situation, or more of an “Oh, my god, the apocalypse guy is in today; keep your heads down,” like that? What do you think is —

Huckabee: Well, it could be that the world is gonna come to an end before the contract expires; I don’t know.

Stewart: [laughs] Well...

Huckabee: He’s a good guy —

Stewart: Yes.

Huckabee: — who’s had a great run.

Stewart: He seems to be a very ... good ...

Huckabee: Big audience. No, I’m serious: he has a huge audience.

Stewart: He does have a huge audience.

Huckabee: And so, uh.... But he also has a big audience on radio, and he does a lot of other stuff, so again: I don’t know. That’s at a pay grade way above mine at Fox.

Stewart: No, I completely understand.

Huckabee: There are big trucks and buses, and then there are those of us who ride the bike lanes there.

Stewart: Does he speak with individuals there, or is he kept in sort of a different facility? Not to say necessarily —

Huckabee: Like, we let him out? Only certain hours or something like that?

Stewart: That — that’s right.

Huckabee: You know, yeah.

Stewart: I’m not suggesting a containment facility, necessarily.

Huckabee: You know, he is — I know there’s people have this perception of him, but he’s actually one of the nicest, most gregarious people —

Stewart: Off-air?

Huckabee: [laughs] Yeah. But I mean —

Stewart: When you go on TV and you’re like, “Progressives are a cancer in this country!” You know, but, like, “He’s a nice guy.” Really?? He just called for us to be cut out of the body. A little harsh, isn’t it?

Huckabee: Well, I’m sure it wouldn’t be the most comfortable thing, if you were a progressive, for sure, but —

Stewart: Well —

Huckabee: — anyway.

Stewart: All right.

Huckabee: I don’t know.

Stewart: You know, which brings me to an interesting point. Here’s something I wanted to discuss. We always get into good conversations. Uh, it seems like, whenever the conservatives in this country, the Right, it feels like they’ve lost a trust, or it feels like they’re not well represented in this country by institutions like universities or news, so they have created almost mirror institutions that they feel more comfortable with or that reflect more their viewpoint. Do you think that’s a healthy development for conservatives, or could it lead to, maybe, distortions and maybe poorly informed people?

Huckabee: Well, I think it’s a natural result of what has been perceived as a very distinct bias in many of the institutions that heretofore were looked at as objective. For example, when you have news anchors talking about a tingle going up their leg when they hear Obama speak, it’s hard for conservatives to say, “Now, there’s an objective point-of-view!”

Stewart: But that’s Chris Matthews; I don’t think you’ve ever — I mean, I don’t think anybody held Chris Matthews up as a paragon of independence —

Huckabee: He holds himself up as that, so —

Stewart: Well, that’s helium. But you know, I think ... like, for instance, okay, so — you come on the show, we always have very reasonable conversations, and then I see clips of you, like this David Barton historian.

Huckabee: Yeah.

Stewart: You know, you spoke right after him at an event, and you called him the greatest historian in America, and I don’t know if everybody’s familiar with David Barton, but he doesn’t seem like a historian. He seems almost like a theologian whose thrust is, “I want this country to be Christian and to go by the Bible.”

Huckabee: No, David is, I think, very much a historian, and I love his stuff, because he documents everything with source material, and he’s very specific about dates and times and he has a lot of original documents — Federalist Papers, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, things that —

Stewart: But he said that —

Huckabee: He doesn’t just say, “I think, I believe, I hope”; he says, “Here it is, and here’s the page number.” If people want to dispute it, they’re certainly welcome to do it, but —

Stewart: But they do, and usually he has to come back and say, “Yeah, I guess I was wrong about that one.”

Huckabee: I haven’t heard that too much.

Stewart: Well, there were like ten quotes. For instance, the Thomas Jefferson thing. He goes on a long thing about how Thomas Jefferson signed everything “the Year of our Lord” and that meant that he really was Christian and believes that this should be a biblical country. I mean, he has — would you disagree that he has an objective? His objective is, “This is a Christian country.”

Huckabee: I think his objective is to bring some balance to the idea that the Founders had no spiritual direction at all, because I think that —

Stewart: Who ever said that they had no spiritual direction?

Huckabee: Oh, I don’t know; there’s a perception among many that this is a completely secular nation and that the Judeo-Christian worldview was not a very significant part of our creation. I think it was, and that’s what I believe he’s trying to do.

Stewart: But again, now we’re talking — that’s much more measured language than what David Barton advocates, which is, “This is a Christian country, and the Founders knew it was a Christian country, founded it on Christian principle, and if we follow the biblical rules” — what did he say? “Separation of Church and State is a myth”!

Huckabee: Well, separation of Church and State was a phrase that didn’t appear until a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in [1802] 1804, and it was written to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, and it was the polar opposite of how many people have interpreted it. They have interpreted it to say that it was essentially a doctrine that the church wasn’t to involve itself in affairs of state; actually, it was the opposite: it was that the government would not pick out a particular church and establish it as the state church. The First Amendment is very clear: neither preference nor —

Stewart: He is suggesting Christianity is the religion. He would feel very differently — for example, you fought very hard against Shari’a law taking over this country, which, in Oklahoma, especially, I know is an enormous problem. (You never know when they’re gonna get two Halal carts!) So, the, uh — but it’s — but my point is, he is advocating, not — he’s advocating an establishment of religion, of Christianity.

Huckabee: No, I don’t think he’s pushing for an establishment of Christianity, pushing for a recognition that the — for example, the founding documents —

Stewart: We have under God in our Pledge, and that didn’t show up until the 50’s.

Huckabee: 1956 [1954], yeah.

Stewart: Right. Why wouldn’t the Founders, who were creating a constitution, just say, “Let’s put under God on our money — uh, we trust in God on our money, and under God in our Pledge of Allegiance,” and make it explicit? This whole idea that they left us clues: everything else they said was explicit. Why is this a puzzle that this fellow [Barton] has to go back and find evidence of this and this?

Huckabee: Well, listen: take the Declaration of Independence, which was the establishment of our nation as an independent country. When it says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” if you read the early state constitutions, the states — and originally our government was supposed to be a rather weak, limited, and local form of government, with not a whole lot of power at the federal level.

Stewart: Sure, sure.

Huckabee: Power distributed to the states so that it didn’t get held by too few people.

Stewart: Absolutely.

Huckabee: But in the state constitutions, there are some surprising things regarding the establishment of the government, to make sure that there was a Christian — or a Judeo-Christian — there were often these very explicit languages in the constitutions of states in New England that would probably not recognize those constitutions today.

Stewart: And wouldn’t recognize them in that day. Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar, but those constitutions were scuttled because it didn’t work. The Articles of Confederation — you know, it’s interesting to me that so many constitutionalists really sound more like articles-of-confederationalists, and that whole plan was scuttled, ‘cause it didn’t work, and we weren’t able to contain the states, so we formed the Constitution, and none of that was in it. If our Founders wanted it to be explicit, why did they not explicitly put it in, rather than something that had to be so, “See, it says endowed by their Creator...“?

Huckabee: They did want government to be limited and local, and that’s why, when the Bill of Rights were created, and the ten first amendments we had to the Constitution, the tenth one was explicit, that if it’s not contained in the Constitution, that power is left to the states. Now, what we’ve done over the past 240 years is, we have moved more and more power to the federal government. Let me be fair: this isn’t a Democrat / Republican thing, because Republicans have been just as adamant about moving that power more and more toward the federal government and away from cities and states. The danger is that, the closer you are to the people being governed, the more likely you are to get it right, because when you govern more locally, and in a more limited way —

Stewart: Right.

Huckabee: — you’re governing close to the people. I have a feeling you raise your kids better than I would raise them, because I’ve never met your kids.

Stewart: I know a lot of black people who would differ with that opinion, who would say that, you know what, the local guy there maybe didn’t have my best interests at heart, when it came to slavery and Jim Crow.

Huckabee: That’s the balance, though, where the federal government does make sure, but it’s not that the power —

Stewart: But that’s —

Huckabee: — on a day-to-day basis of governing. Now, you know, clearly, I grew up in the Deep South. I saw racism firsthand.

Stewart: That’s a different conversation. Let’s go — we’re going to go to a commercial and come back, because that is a very different conversation from the one we’re having, and that’s your larger government / smaller government, and that’s pendulum swings, but again it gets to this idea of measured language versus a more direct speaking to the base, and I think that’s a big distinction. I want to talk about that. Simple Government is on the bookshelves now; more with Mike Huckabee when we come back off the break.

Part 2

Stewart: We’re back talking to Mike Huckabee. I apologize.

Huckabee: Apologize for talking to me?

Stewart: No, not at all. Umm, when you’re speaking to the base, you’re much more explicit about Christian value and religion than when you’re talking to the public at large, and it feels — I don’t want to say disingenuous, but at times you soft-sell something that I think is maybe more what’s in your heart than you let on, and I don’t know why people wouldn’t embrace it. You know, David Barton, as sort of a historian, I think most historians don’t look at him in that way. They look at him as a guy with an agenda to get America to believe we’re — or to rule itself as — a Christian nation.

Huckabee: Mm-hmm.

Stewart: And I think most historians believe we had that chance and the Founders didn’t take it.

Huckabee: I mean, I think the best thing to counter with David Barton is, read his material and look for yourself. If you don’t believe that he is sourcing it with accuracy, then take issue.

Stewart: But that’s not necessarily the point, and again it gets you back to the evolution / creationist argument in schools, and it gets to my point of creating an alternate reality where your — where history is taken in reverse to justify your modern beliefs. Now, I’ll just go — okay, here’s David Barton. This is him on immigration policy: “It is God and not man who establishes the borders of nations. National boundaries are set by God. If God didn’t want boundaries, He would’ve put everyone in the same world and there would’ve been no nations.” Now, you do know, when the world started, that is what we were? Now, that’s not “historian.” That’s a guy going —

Huckabee: I’m not familiar with that statement by David, so, out of its context, I can’t speak to that. I just know that if he talks — and I’ve heard him on many occasions, I’ve read his material, I’ve seen other things that he’s done — and I’m very impressed with the fact that he rarely if ever — I don’t think I’ve ever heard David say, “I think,” “I believe,” “I hope” —

Stewart: No, he doesn’t. He’s very certain.

Huckabee: Yeah. But he sources it with documentation, is what I’m saying.

Stewart: He can’t. How can a historian say, “It is God and not man who establishes the borders of nations”? Is he familiar with Great Britain?

Huckabee: I’m sure he is.

Stewart: They’re the ones who established the borders of nations; they did it in 1909. Uh, I mean, “Jesus has an entire teaching on the minimum wage.” [audience laughs] “Is Jesus for or against the minimum wage? Here’s a hint: Jesus did not like the minimum wage.“ “The Bible condemns the estate tax as one of the most immoral taxes out there.” “For 40 years, parties have gone back and forth on capital gains tax. It really doesn’t matter to me what either party says, because the Bible is clear: Jesus has two teachings on capital gains tax.”

Huckabee: Well, let me address one of those, because you’ve gone through several, but let’s just take the one about the minimum wage. I know what he’s basing that on, because I’ve heard him talk about it.

Stewart: Right.

Huckabee: The parable in which Jesus told of three workers: one who went early in the day, one who went in the middle of the day, and one who went late in the day, and at the end of the day they all got the same wages, and one was saying, “Hey, wait a minute! I worked all day,” and the master said, “It is not for you to decide what I pay, because you agreed to the wage for the whole day, and the other one agreed to the wage for half the day, and the other one agreed to a wage which was for only a small part of the day.” And I think what David was saying is not that there’s a hard-and-fast policy, but there is a principle, which is, if you agree to work for someone for a wage, then what someone else gets paid is really not the issue. It’s, did you agree to work for that wage, and if you did, then you agreed to work for it. I mean, there are people who get paid a lot more money than I do, and some don’t get paid as much.

Stewart: Right. There’s also parables in there about turning people into salt; that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any in your diet. But the point isn’t that. The point is, a historian doesn’t use a theological argument to back up a policy choice. That’s my beef, is that that’s not historian.

Huckabee: You should invite David on the show.

Stewart: I would absolutely invite David on the show.

Huckabee: You should do that, because he’s a much better defender of his views, because, I mean, I’m not David Barton.

Stewart: So why say he’s the greatest historian, though? Why praise him and say you’d like his teachings taught in schools? Because, I mean, if you want to go with the Bible, I have a quote here from Jesus that says, “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.” If that ain’t socialism and redistribution of wealth, I don’t know what is. If you want to be perfect — I mean —

Huckabee: Jon, you could take, also, the Bible says Judas went and hanged himself [Matt. 27:5] and then later “Go thou and do likewise.” [Luke 10:37] If you put those two together, you’d end up with some real problems.

Stewart: That’s exactly right, and it has things that excuse slavery. So why would you use it to make a policy argument in the 21st century about our tax code, and still be considered a historian??

Huckabee: Well, here’s what I do think David would say — and again, I think you should invite him to let him defend himself —

Stewart: I will.

Huckabee: — but I don’t believe that we ought to be punishing productivity and rewarding irresponsibility. That is the basic principle that I think is not only Biblical, I think it’s common sense. The current tax code —

Stewart: Don’t quote Jesus, quote Andrew Carnegie! Why would you —

Huckabee: But I think it is a principle that you will find in the Proverbs, and you will find it as part of that parable that I spoke of earlier, that when people work they should be rewarded, and if they don’t work they should not be rewarded for that. I mean, I was one of the Republicans who thought that TARP was a terrible idea, because what we did, we picked out really poorly run institutions and bailed them out, off the backs of well-run small businesses all over America, who didn’t get a bailout.

Stewart: Consider the lilies, for they sit and do nothing, and yet I provide for them. (I’m paraphrasing, because I don’t know the Bible.) But Jesus also says the lilies do nothing to earn me providing for them, and yet I do it.

Huckabee: But the point of that particular Biblical reference was not to say, “Oh, it’s great to do nothing.” It’s saying that God was blessing — the lilies of the field are not out there doing anything in particular to be beautiful, but God blesses the lilies of the field, and that was the point. It wasn’t to bless laziness, it was to bless beauty.

Stewart: Says a theological manifestation of that, not a his[torical] — my problem is using that, and applying it to political leverage. He’s basically saying —

Huckabee: David’s never run for office.

Stewart: But you’re gonna run for President and you call him a historian who you think should teach our children in public school. Now, that is the intersection of state and religion that makes some people — non-evangelical Christians — uncomfortable.

Huckabee: Some of us, Jon, are uncomfortable with the idea that we have history books today in which there is more material about, let’s say, Madonna, than there is about George Washington. That’s the thing.

Stewart: Different argument. If there —

Huckabee: But I’m just telling you, there is a very strong —

Stewart: If there is more material about Madonna than about George Washington, I agree with you. That seems wrong. Don’t know what Jesus would think of that.

Huckabee: I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be that fond of it!

Stewart: I think it all depends on which Madonna we’re talkin’ about, but —

Huckabee: Well, I’m pretty sure that Jesus wouldn’t be talkin’ about the one today.

Part 3

Stewart: Do you see the point I’m making? When we’re talking, it’s all “you understand, yes, that makes me uncomfortable,” but then there seems to be this conversation happening amongst the base that is saying, “This guy needs to be put in a position where he is in charge of children’s education. We need to get Christianity“ —

Huckabee: I wish people would listen to David Barton, and then they can make up their own minds and draw their own conclusions, because I think he is more than willing to stand on what he teaches and what he says, and if people want to argue with it, they can, but they can argue with anyone, too.

Stewart: They can’t if that’s the curriculum that the President of the United States, or someone who would like to be, is now putting through. That’s my point about what makes me uncomfortable with these Texas curriculum changes and all that is, they’re not looking at it from a historical perspective, they’re looking at a way to justify their religious beliefs within the context of the country, and I think that’s — Here’s my point.

Huckabee: All right.

Stewart: Dearborn, Michigan, is, let’s say, has a high majority of Muslims. Would you be comfortable, since the majority in that area are Muslims, with them committing to praying five times a day, in the public schools, and employing Shari’a law in a public school? Would that be okay with you?

Huckabee: I would not be happy with the Shari’a law. I think that would be problematic, because we don’t have Shari’a law in this country. We have a constitutional republic that we elect representatives to create laws and they’re not laws that are based on Islam — or, for that matter, that are directly out of, let’s say, the Old and the New Testament, though they might be gleaned from it.

Stewart: But this is you saying, “I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of living God. And that is what we need to do, is so amend the Constitution so if in God’s standards — rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view how we treat each other and how we treat the family.” [video] That sounds like you would like to line up —

Huckabee: Let me just — because that is a quote that has been thrown at me many, many a time.

Stewart: All right. Tell me the context, because I could use that.

Huckabee: The context of that quote was, when people say we should not amend the Constitution, because it is a sacred document. My point is, the Constitution was created — and the genius of it is that it can be amended. The Scriptures — any religious document, whether it’s the Qur’an, or for that matter the New Testament — is not a scripture that is written so that every culture can come and revise it and revisit it and then change it so it fits the culture. The culture is to fit holy scripture, not the other way around. That was the point that I was making, and specifically a reference to pro-life, that it would be easier to amend the Constitution so that we affirm the intrinsic worth and value of every human soul —

Stewart: Oh, okay.

Huckabee: — than it would be, “Well, let’s —”

Stewart: So you were not expressing a thought that you were comfortable with the idea of the Constitution being amended to be in line with biblical law.

Huckabee: No, I was not saying that what we ought to do is enforce the everybody that they have to tithe of their income, in addition to their taxes, and that they have to go to church, because, frankly, once you force people into any form of religious practice, it no longer has any meaning whatsoever. It has to come out of one’s own heart and spirit and free will, or then it becomes an absolute form and it is led by a rote memory as opposed to something out of the heart and soul.

Stewart: Do you believe I’m overreacting to the wish to influence, or to grant this country this idea of a divine providence through Christianity as our foundation? You think I’m over-exaggerating, perhaps, that influence in more, maybe, conservative politics?

Huckabee: Yeah, I think you are. I think you’re an incredible exaggerator on that point.

Stewart: Really??

Huckabee: Yeah! Well, I don’t think you are doing it consciously, but I do believe it’s, like, scaring you, and it shouldn’t. I think, again, it’s a matter of understanding that there are people who do believe — and I think legitimately — that there is a growing antagonism toward people who are Christian. Let me give you a specific example: tax dollars funded the placing of a crucifix in a jar of urine —

Stewart: Right.

Huckabee: — under the arts program, when Andres Serrano’s famous Piss Christ piece of art. This week, you had Harry Reid saying that he thinks, because of this nutcase pastor down in Florida who’s burning a Qur’an, that maybe we need to revisit the First Amendment. [see FOOTNOTE below] No, we don’t need to revisit the First Amendment. The First Amendment gives people the right to be stupid. That’s okay. In this country, you can say dumb things, you can say ridiculous things —

Stewart: You can make a living at it.

Huckabee: And a lot of people do. But you don’t want to go back and tell people, “Oh, if you say something bad about Muslims, we’re gonna shut you up. But you can say something terrible about Christians, and we’re gonna tax subsidize that.” That’s the problem, Jon, that a lot of people are feeling, is that there’s a complete double standard here.

Stewart: Here’s what I would suggest: I would suggest that strikes me as more of an exaggeration of the peril of Christians than what I was suggesting in terms of — I mean, there is curriculums in Texas that set the stage for curriculums all across the country, that are influenced now by a more conservative Christian viewpoint. You pointed to Andres Serrano, which was, I don’t know, 1990-something?

Huckabee: Yeah, like ‘91, something like that. [in fact, 1989]

Stewart: You know, I have to say, as someone who is not Christian, it’s hard for me to believe that Christians are a persecuted people in America. I know — Maybe, God willing, God willing, maybe one of you one day will even rise up and get to be President of this country. Or maybe 44 in a row. But that’s my point, is they’ve taken this idea of — you know, freedom, no “establishment” — as persecution, because they feel entitled — not to equal status, but to greater status.

Huckabee: No, I don’t agree with that. I do not think that Christians believe that they should be able to —

Stewart: Tell me how there’s a war on Christmas, then, because to me it’s the most ubiquitous thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean —

Huckabee: Well, the secularization of it certainly is, but that’s —

Stewart: That’s a very different thing from persecution.

Huckabee: Many public schools can’t sing about the historic meaning of Christmas, if it has any reference that might be about Jesus —

Stewart: There is idiocy out there, I’ll give you that.

Huckabee: Yeah.

Stewart: There is politically correct idiocy out there. I’ll give you that.

Huckabee: And no manger scenes, because that might somehow be religious. Of course it’s religious! The term Christ-mas means the worship of Christ, Christ’s mass. That’s what it means. So if we want to completely secularize it, let’s just call it the biggest gift-giving shopping day in America.

Stewart: The secularization of Christmas was not the result of a persecution of Christians —

Huckabee: No.

Stewart: — or a multi-cultural war on Christians. It was the result of Gimbels and Macy*s, and our free-market system. So, I don’t think you can have it both ways. And in the conservative viewpoint, “free market” is god, except where it comes to God, then God is god, except where it comes to the Constitution, and then that’s god. I think you’ve gotta pick your infallible document.

Huckabee: That really was confusing.

Stewart: I know.

Huckabee: I’ve gotta tell you.

Stewart: Can I tell ya something, though?

Huckabee: Tell me something.

Stewart: I love you.

Huckabee: Well, thank you.

Stewart: Because you challenge beliefs that I have and you challenge easy beliefs that I have and you force me to reconsider them in the context of other issues, and I really do appreciate you being able to do that with such good humor. Umm, and I know when you leave here, obviously, you’ll go back to —

Huckabee: I’ll probably go —

Stewart: — David Barton and the church, and I appreciate that.

Huckabee: Yes, well.

Stewart: No, I really do appreciate you doin’ that.

Huckabee: Well, I appreciate you, because you always have a civil conversation with me, and you don’t belittle the fact that I have very clear Christian beliefs, and I appreciate that.

Stewart: Because I don’t belittle faith. I am a great — faith is, many times, all people have, and I always say this to people: we need religion to give grace and comfort to a world torn apart by religion. And I think it’s important that we —

Huckabee: Let me correct you: torn apart by a perversion of true religion.

Stewart: Yes, a perversion of religion. It’s always important that we —

Huckabee: A perversion. Because true religion will make me love you —

Stewart: Exactly.

Huckabee: — and will also make me see, if you have a need —

Stewart: Right.

Huckabee: — whether it’s hunger, or whether it’s that you are hurting — true religion will make me sensitive to that need and want to help meet that need. If it doesn’t, then I have to question whether it’s valid.

Stewart: It’s always important for people who see a dark side in powerful institutions to also recognize the power that they also bring to people, and the faith. And I have seen it myself in people, and I have great faith. Obviously, I’ve been a Met fan 40 years, and I... [laughter] But I really do appreciate you being here.

Huckabee: Always a pleasure, Jon.

Stewart: And I will have this fellow David Barton on —

Huckabee: You should have him on!

Stewart: — and I’ll let him yell at me in person. Because I think that — Is he a nice fellow?

Huckabee: He’s incredibly nice, very mild-mannered and well-spoken, and I think you would have a delightful conversation with him. I really do. [audience laughs] Maybe you won’t; I don’t know.

Stewart: Should I make finger sandwiches, because that’s what it sounds like. Thank you for being here.

Huckabee: Always a pleasure, thank you.

FOOTNOTE: On Sunday, 2011-04-03, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R–SC) were guests on CBS News Face the Nation; transcript. Senator Reid said (page 3): “We’ll — we’ll take a look at this, of course. John Kerry, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has been on top of this. He’s made many trips to Afghanistan. And I think we’ll take a look at this as to whether we need hearings or not, I don’t know.”

Senator Lindsey Graham (R–SC) said later in the broadcast (page 7), “You know, I wish we could find some way to— to— to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea but we’re in a war. During World War II, you had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy.”

Neither senator used the word “revisit,” and in particular Senator Reid only suggested that Congress might consider a resolution condemning the burning of the Qur’an at the church in Florida.

Transcript: Rumsfeld on The Daily Show (extended)

2011-02-23T23:29:00.000-08:00

This is a quick transcript of the full extended interview of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 2011-02-23. The embedded video is in three segments, totaling just over half an hour.

The Daily Show - Exclusive - Donald Rumsfeld Extended Interview Pt. 1
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Jon Stewart: Welcome back! My guest tonight served as Secretary of Defense in two different Presidential administrations, most recently under George W. Bush; his memoir is called Known and Unknown. Please welcome to the program Donald Rumsfeld. Sir! Nice to see you.

Donald Rumsfeld: Thank you.

Stewart: Please, come and join us. Thank you. Please, thank you for being here. We appreciate it. The book is Known and Unknown, and that's you, right there in a vest.

Rumsfeld: In Taos, New Mexico.

Stewart: Is that Taos, New Mexico? Lovely place, by the way. Uh, obviously, you know, "elephant in the room": tension between us. I think I know why you're here, and let me just deflate the attention, right off the bat: apology accepted. [audience cheers] Now we can move on, have a nice day, a nice conversation. I know this has been troubling you for some time now. I do thank you for being here. I don't even know where to start, so let's start with Iraq. Okay.

Rumsfeld: Why am I not surprised?

Stewart: I don't know. I will take your stony silence as acceptance. There's an interesting quote that you had in the book about John Ehrlichman, who was in the Nixon White House, and you worked with Ehrlichman. And you say to him — uh, about him — "He seemed to have a high degree of certainty about his views that bordered on arrogance: a trait that did him no favors as he gathered more influence in the White House. Certainty without power can be interesting, even amusing; certainty with power can be dangerous." And I thought, Boy, if there was ever a solid critique of the administration you served under President Bush, it would be that. Certainty with power is dangerous: true or false?

Rumsfeld: If you go to the website that I put up, rumsfeld.com, there are hundreds of documents, thousands of pages, and what you will see is the absence of certainty. You will see probing, questioning, wondering — Do we have enough information? Are there things we ought to know? It's quite exactly the opposite.

Stewart: If you would go to my TiVo —

Rumsfeld: [to audience] He doesn't think I know what that means!

Stewart: What I said — you said "rumsfeld.com"; you're way ahead of me, brother. I'm still lickin' stamps and puttin' 'em on envelopes and hopin' it's gettin' to wherever it's goin'. Umm, I think there is — I guess I'm drawing a distinction, perhaps, between the internal deliberations —

Rumsfeld: Right.

Stewart: — and what was presented to the American public.

Rumsfeld: Mmm-hmm.

Stewart: Because what was presented to the American public was a picture of — not just relative certainty — certainty bordering on arrogance, and there was a dismissiveness to anyone who would challenge that certainty. That's not how you remember it?

Rumsfeld: It isn't, at all, really. I mean, I know what was going through my mind, and I know the kinds of questions the President would ask and the questions that Colin Powell or Condi Rice or the Vice President would ask, and there was a searching, there was lots of questions.

Stewart: A yearning, if you will.

Rumsfeld: Well, it's not quite the word I would've used.

Stewart: Do you — so, you disagree that the administration showed a face of certainty when it came to the intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War? Is that —

Rumsfeld: No, no. In that respect, you're exactly right. There's no question that the intelligence community presented that information, Colin Powell made the presentation at the United Nations — he spent — he probably had as much experience dealing with intelligence products as anyone in the government, including the Director of the CIA. He spent days on it, he worked hard on it, he believed every word he said.

Stewart: Right.

Rumsfeld: And yet he — and he presented it that way. Now, the intelligence always is never perfect. It's always questionable; you have to question it.

Stewart: Did you guys know intelligence was never perfect?

Rumsfeld: Oh, my goodness, yes.

Stewart: I feel like we're sitting on a porch now, sipping lemonade.

Rumsfeld: I said what I shouldn't've said.

Stewart: "Oh, my goodness."

Rumsfeld: "Oh, my goodness."

Stewart: Do you — let me say this —

Rumsfeld: He makes fun of that, but there are a lot of people in the Heartland of America who talk like I do —

Stewart: No, I —

Rumsfeld: — maybe not on the coasts, but in the Heartland they do.

Stewart: Yes, on the coasts we just curse and have gay sex. That's all we do. We just run around cursing and gay-sexing each other.

Rumsfeld: No, let me go back to Colin Powell.

Stewart: Right. Powell was not the only one, to be fair —

Rumsfeld: Of course not. Of course not. The President made the decision, Colin Powell made the presentation. There was no one in the NSC who disagreed with that.

Stewart: Well, I would take issue with some of that. For instance, the linkage between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, in terms of the intelligence —

Rumsfeld: There wasn't much of a linkage at all.

Stewart: Thank you. We didn't hear that, though; what we heard was, there was a direct link, "You cannot talk about the War on Terror...." You even came out and talked about how this fellow — you didn't mention his name, but [Ibn al Shaykh] al Libi — had described training that had been occurring from Iraq to Al Qaeda —

Rumsfeld: There had been training camps, and there was an Al Qaeda-connected group called Ansar al Islam (ئه‌نسه‌ر ئه‌ل إسلام) up in Kermal that was actually preparing chemicals, and we found traces of Ricin and Potassium Chlorate (KClO₃) after major combat operations — and Saddam Hussein was giving $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers, and he'd been on the State Department terrorism list for years.

Stewart: No question he was doing that. No question he was on that list. I think my ultimate point is — and I guess I'm somewhat getting to it — is, there was no real momentum for a war in Iraq. We had to focus the country on that. Afghanistan didn't take much convincing. People, I think, were behind that one.

Rumsfeld: I think that's fair.

Stewart: So, the White House and the Defense Department and the State Department had to coordinate a pretty extraordinary effort to gather information and convince America that this was in our best interests to do so. And would it be fair to consider that, in the effort that it took to sell us this, that we lost our —

Rumsfeld: That's a little strong.

Stewart: "Sell" is the wrong word? Let me back up a little. In the effort it took the Administration to —

Rumsfeld: Present? [audience laughs] I'm just tryin' to help ya!

Stewart: Thank you; I appreciate that. Oh, if only I had talked to you before.... Okay, not "sell." I wouldn't say "present" because they did not present, they gave us, again, they were pretty certain when it came out; all the deliberation had been done, so it wasn't — they were —

Rumsfeld: You want to know what I did at one point?

Stewart: Yes.

Rumsfeld: In the book, I talk about it. I sat down and prepared a list of all the things that could go wrong.

Stewart: "The Parade of Horribles."

Rumsfeld: Exactly. And one of them was, there might not be weapons of mass destruction.

Stewart: That's right.

Rumsfeld: And another one was, it might last six or eight years. And —

Stewart: Mmm-hmm. Did you "star" those?

Rumsfeld: No. No, I didn't. And I didn't believe them, but I just knew that a rational person had to sit down and say, What are the things that could go wrong?

Stewart: Right.

Rumsfeld: And I presented it to the President and to the —

Stewart: Now we're getting somewhere.

Rumsfeld: — National Security Council.

Stewart: Right.

Rumsfeld: Could I give you a little background?

Stewart: No. [audience laughs] But wouldn't a rational person — so you presented — I guess what I'm saying is —

Rumsfeld: Please.

Stewart: The effort on presenting us the information of certainty that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat that had weapons of mass destruction capability and was in the process of disseminating that to Al Qaeda operatives — the effort to present that —

Rumsfeld: You've overstated.

Stewart: [skeptically] Hmm.

Rumsfeld: Yeah, promise. Goodness gracious.

Stewart: Do you want to — does the, does the — all right. We're going to go to commercial. We'll come back and I'll finish and I will try and recalibrate —

Rumsfeld: Me?

Stewart: Yes.

[break]

[PART 2]

The Daily Show - Exclusive - Donald Rumsfeld Extended Interview Pt. 2
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Stewart: What I'm trying to get to is this: You had a memo of "Parade of Horribles." Two pages or three pages?

Rumsfeld: I don't know.

Stewart: It was about 30 or 40 "Horribles." But you —

Rumsfeld: Possible "Horribles."

Stewart: Possible "Horribles."

Rumsfeld: I didn't know.

Stewart: You don't know if that parade's gonna happen; it could be a Puerto Rican Day parade; nobody knows. It could be a [inaudible] parade. But my point is, it seemed that the effort that the Administration exuded was more geared toward making the case of why we had to do this than examining your memo. You say yourself in the book, "I gave the memo to the NSC; I don't know what happened to it."

Rumsfeld: Not quite.

Stewart: You gave the memo to the NSC but they didn't really pay attention?

Rumsfeld: Individuals did, and people did make preparations for some of those things. Certainly we did in the [Defense] Department. There were not extensive meetings on them —

Stewart: — but that's my point.

Rumsfeld: Fair enough.

Stewart: The White House Iraq Group met weekly. The group that was assigned the job of coordinating the "presentation" about going to war in Iraq, met weekly.

Rumsfeld: Mmm-hmm. I guess so. I don't know. That would've been at a different level. The NSC met frequently.

Stewart: Did they tell you anything? [Rumsfeld scoffs, audience laughs] You poor man!

Rumsfeld: No, I don't know what —

Stewart: Are you not on the e-mail list?? Are you not cc'd?

Rumsfeld: I was in the National Security —

Stewart: There was a White House Iraq Group.

Rumsfeld: Of course there was.

Stewart: No, I'm telling you.

Rumsfeld: No, I know that.

Stewart: Did you know — you created a whole office to deal with intelligence within the Pentagon, called the Office of Special Plans. Did you know that??

Rumsfeld: I didn't create it. I did; he told me.

Stewart: You recommended it.

Rumsfeld: I did not.

Stewart: You didn't recommend that office??

Rumsfeld: No!

Stewart: Did you have any power over there??

Rumsfeld: Yes.

Stewart: You did have a lot of power?

Rumsfeld: Sure.

Stewart: So they said to you, "Can we create a special office called the Office of Special Plans, to deal with intelligence?" You could've said, "I don't think that's a good idea."

Rumsfeld: There are three million people in that operation, and everyone did not ask me everything they were going to do; they were delegated large chunks of responsibility.

Stewart: Your undersecretary Doug Feith, though —

Rumsfeld: They were very good people, and they did a good job.

Stewart: Well, let's not get crazy. [audience laughs] How did they do a good job??

Rumsfeld: We disagree on that!

Stewart: But no, how did they do a good job?? They were wrong about the major implications of why we went to war. How did they do a good job?? And in fact —

Rumsfeld: Well, the intelligence community was wrong on the facts on weapons of mass destruction. A lot was right.

Stewart: But there were people within the [Defense Intelligence Agency] (DIA), even, and the CIA, who were saying, "Curveball and al Libi: they are not credible!" These people, before the administration went out to present that information as fact.

Rumsfeld: I was not the head of intelligence, and I was not making the presentation. I can tell you that those people are honorable people — George Tenet and Colin Powell. They gathered hundreds of pieces of information, hundreds and hundreds, some from human beings — some of whom were wrong, some who lied. Some lied for money, maybe. Some lied for self-aggrandizement.

Stewart: Right.

Rumsfeld: That's always true with intelligence gathering. It's a very tough job.

Stewart: I understand that.

Rumsfeld: And they did an imperfect job, but they did the best job they could. And there are dozens of instances throughout our history.

Stewart: I want to make it clear: I am not impugning whether they are honorable people in any way, shape, or form.

Rumsfeld: Good, good.

Stewart: What I am suggesting is — and maybe I'm not being clear — is that you're surrounded by a group of individuals who are in the PNAC — you know, the group you were a signatory to, that talked about changing régimes in Iraq in 1998.

Rumsfeld: The National Security Council?

Stewart: No, the [Project for a] New American Century.

Rumsfeld: Oh, back in the '90s.

Stewart: Exactly, back in the '90s, before even September 11, that talked about, this is something we need to do. They are in the Defense Department, dealing with the intelligence — can you, in your — was there any point that you saw intelligence that countered the idea that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that made it to the public — that was presented by the administration to the public? What I'm saying is, whatever internal disagreements they had, they solved amongst themselves, and presented a unified, very direct, relentless campaign that we needed to take out Saddam Hussein. It would be painless, it would pay for itself.

Rumsfeld: No, no, no, no. No. You were right, up to that point. No one in the Pentagon thought it would be painless.

Stewart: I'm not talking about "thought." You're saying presented to the American public.

Rumsfeld: No.

Stewart: Who brought up pain?

Rumsfeld: I have no idea, but you did. No one in the Pentagon — people in the Pentagon know that war is a terrible thing, that people die, that people get wounded, and they know that, looking throughout history, no one is smart enough to tell you how long a war is going to last, how much it's going to cost, or how many people are going to be killed or wounded. You just can't know that.

Stewart: You have to pardon my skepticism here, because, being alive during that time, there was an insistent drumbeat. You said, "How long will the military operation take? It will take six days, maybe six weeks; I doubt it will take six months."

Rumsfeld: That was major combat operations.

Stewart: "Major combat operations."

Rumsfeld: And I was right. I was vague because I didn't know.

Stewart: That's not very vague. That's saying six days, six weeks —

Rumsfeld: And what did it take?

Stewart: Five weeks. So it was within your range. But later on in the book, they talk about, "Why was security so bad in Iraq? Catastrophic success." We had no idea Saddam's army was going to fall so quickly. So, the reason we couldn't've planned for that is that we just never knew it was going to happen. It feels like you sold us a car — and you said this is a car you have to have, it's going to keep your family safe — we got in the car and it flipped over, rolled down an embankment, burst into flames, and then we came back to you and said, "That's a crappy car!!" and you went, "Hey, you never know with cars." Do you get what I'm frustrated with here? You guys own the Iraq War — unfairly, maybe, but because you pushed so hard to make it happen.

Rumsfeld: We'll come back to that, but I don't think it's correct to say we pushed hard to make it happen. The President made a decision that it should be done. He had been attacked in our country, he spent day and night trying to make sure that the American people were safe, that there wouldn't be another attack, putting pressure on terrorists — deeply concerned about the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons. At that moment, Johns Hopkins [University] had done a study called "Dark Winter," and you're undoubtedly familiar with it —

Stewart: Mmm-hmm.

Rumsfeld: — where they put smallpox in three locations in our country, and within a matter of months, close to a million people were dead. And imagine: you'd have to have martial law and quarantines. It was clearly a deep concern on the part of people in the government, in the Congress, in the intelligence community, that there could be chemical or biological weapons, that they could be provided to a terrorist network, we had just lost 3,000 people here. I know the President and others there got up every day, determined to try and protect the American people. Now, in retrospect, it's easy to say what you said. And put yourself in their shoes at the time. I don't think there were people rushing to judgment; in fact, I know at the very end, the President and I talked, and Colin Powell and others, and he tried to offer Saddam Hussein a chance to leave with his family, to prevent a war. There were any number of — no one was rushing to war. It may, in retrospect, make you feel that way, but I was there.

Stewart: But I wouldn't suggest "rushing"; what I would suggest is "relentlessly pushing to make something happen there," and I think the frustration is, the lead-up to the war is — and I'll give you the example, and this is maybe not one of your fondest memories, but you were speaking in front of the troops and one of the gentlemen who you were speaking with asked a question, one of your troops said, "Why do we have to scrounge" — and I'm paraphrasing — "to get scrap metal and things to up-armor our vehicles?" because the IED explosions, etc., are really damaging us, and we don't have the MRAPs, the Mine-Resistent [Ambush-Protected] vehicles. And you said, "You go to war with the Army you have, not necessarily the Army that you wish you had."

Rumsfeld: That's not incorrect, but let me tell you what I really said.

Stewart: Okay.

Rumsfeld: In the transcript of that briefing, presentation, question-and-answer period — apparently some press person had given that question to him. [Note: to find the exchange in question, click on the transcript link and search for the word "logistical."] I answered probably three or four or five minutes, explaining all that had been done. Then I said that, which is true. I mean, every President, every Secretary of Defense, every Congress, is left what their predecessors provided them. That is just a fact of life. And you use those things, and you then put in play things for the future, and your successors will use the things you put in play, so the fact is, the quote was correct.

Stewart: Right.

Rumsfeld: Now, then I asked the general to come up and talk to the troops and tell them precisely what they were doing. What a combatant commander has to do is, to the extent the enemy has a brain, the enemy keeps adjusting and adapting, and that's what happened: the insurgents constantly were putting different types of IEDs out there, and therefore the tactics, techniques, and procedures of the military commander had to adjust, and they did. Finally, I said, "Well, look, just stop any vehicle that doesn't have the proper armor, just don't take it anywhere outside of a compound," and they didn't, and I said, "We'll fly in armor, we'll fly in people to attach the armor." Of course, then you put the armor on vehicles that aren't used to the armor and the hinges get bad, the suspension gets bad, and the society, the Congress, the Department of Defense, in the year 1990s, after the Cold War, drew down, lowered the budgets, reduced the level for support for intelligence, and we had to literally deal with what we had. And it was pretty darned good, and they did a great job.

[break]

[PART 3]

The Daily Show - Exclusive - Donald Rumsfeld Extended Interview Pt. 3
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Stewart: My question to you was more along the lines of, we chose when to go to war, and we knew — so, if we choose when to go to war, why do we go to war with the army that we have when we know — people have been raising the issue of mines and IEDs and those vehicles and the MRAPs — they've been screaming for it — why, then, go at that time?

Rumsfeld: They hadn't been screaming for them before the Iraq War.

Stewart: No, once it started. No, [General Anthony] Zinni, or one of those gentlemen, was talking about how war, and that, and mines and the IEDs were going to be a terrible problem, and that was in the '90s, when they were planning, when he put together the first plan, which was, what would happen in a post-Saddam Iraq. So it was — I guess what I'm saying is, there are known knowns. We had "knowns" before we went in, we had a "Parade of Horribles" memo — it seemed like those were minimized, and everything that could go right was maximized.

Rumsfeld: I don't think so. I sat in the room where the President of the United States, who had to make these decisions — and they're tough decisions — and he did not rush to them. He took them very seriously. He went around the room with all the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the combatant commanders, and said, "Do you have everything you need?"

Stewart: Right.

Rumsfeld: And each one of them looked him in the eye and said yes.

Stewart: But it's clear that they didn't. It was clear that certain people said that others wanted more troops to go in there. There was a lot of people that thought this was a bad idea, that we needed more troops for the postwar, that we needed to protect the security situation in Iraq. Dick Cheney himself said in 1994, the reason we don't go into Baghdad is, it would be chaos: who would you give it over to? Well, what changed?? Why is it that it feels like we didn't do enough planning to protect against the chaos, yet we did so much planning to coalesce the information that convinced Americans that this was something that had to be done? My chief complaint is, I feel like so much time and effort was spent on making Americans feel like, if we didn't do this, "the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud," when, in essence, we didn't have to do it, the intelligence proved itself to be faulty, and our postwar plan proved itself to be inadequate — and isn't that a reasonable criticism to make of the administration that was accountable for that?

Rumsfeld: It is certainly a criticism that is made. [Stewart laughs] And you have done it.

Stewart: [laughing] Damn you, Rumsfeld!!

Rumsfeld: Just a minute: and you have done it.

Stewart: Yes.

Rumsfeld: You have done it.

Stewart: But you think that's completely — because we weren't in those meetings. I wasn't in the meeting where Bush went, "Geez, it could go all wrong — maybe we should put in 500,000 people." The face presented to the American people was one of certainty — arrogant certainty.

Rumsfeld: I think when a President makes a decision, he has to lay it out, and he may continue to question his people, he may talk to the combatant commander, he may talk to the Secretary of Defense, and say, "What about this? What about this? What about that?" But when he goes out and decides to do something, he doesn't go out and say, "Well, what about this? What about that?," he goes out and says, "We're going this way." Now, it was Eisenhower, I think, who said, "The plan is nothing; planning is everything." And what did he mean? The enemy has a brain. There's never been a war that went by plan. The first contact with the enemy, the plan goes out. And then you start adapting and adjusting and fixing things the way you have to; that's the nature of it. Look at World War II. You've read the history books about what took place in Germany, in Bremen, and it was just total disorder for a period. When you go from one régime to another, it's almost inevitable. I don't think that was a surprise.

Stewart: But don't you think that there's a reason Afghanistan has not had the same level of criticism that Iraq has had? And there's a difference of perception of how we got into Afghanistan, versus how we got into Iraq.

Rumsfeld: I think that's fair.

Stewart: And so the higher level of criticism towards Iraq is based on the idea that there was a momentum created by the administration to get us there. And that's why the criticism is more pointed, and in some ways makes the architects of it more accountable to these "You know, it's war, and things happen." And I think it's difficult, you know — look, I'm not suggesting that these people aren't honorable or that they're not humane, but during that time there was a lot of dismissiveness over the criticism and a lot of, as you said, "Henny Penny, the sky is falling!" but the result of this war is 100,000 — easily, lowball — Iraqi civilians killed, 5,000 Americans. It's very difficult to hear sometimes the shrugging off of things as, "Hey, man, things happen in war," when this was clearly something that felt not inevitable.

Rumsfeld: Well, I mean, you're clearly — there's no one — certainly not Don Rumsfeld or the President or anyone involved — who doesn't, every single day, think of the people whose lives have been lost, and you've visited the wounded, as I have, and you carry that with you every day. These are people whose lives have changed, and they've sacrificed, and you always worry in a war that that's going to happen, and you know it's going to happen, and it's heartbreaking. I think that it is fair to say that much of what you've said is correct; on the other hand, if you look at Iraq today, I think that the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. He was a vicious dictator. We have a beginnings of a democratic process there with the Maliki (نوري المالكي‎) government, the constitution they drafted. They've got the schools open. Are there still terrorists attacking people? Yes. Are people getting killed in that country? Yes. Is it likely to go on? I think probably. It's not a peaceful place. There are deep splits among the ethnic groups in the country. One other thing that happened, interestingly, thinking of what's going on in North Africa today, when [Libyan dictator Moammar] Khadafy (معمر القذافي‎) saw what happened to Saddam Hussein, he had a nuclear program. He said, "I don't want to be Saddam Hussein! I'm gonna give it up," and he invited inspectors in and totally dismantled it. And we don't have a nuclear competition, or arms race, taking place in the region, and that's a good thing.

Stewart: Yeah, we have a winner, which is Iran. I mean, when you speak of, "the world is better off," and Saddam Hussein, obviously there's a cost-benefit analysis, and I don't think anyone in their right mind would say, "Geez, Saddam Hussein was a great leader," but it's very difficult when you start to get into, "Well, the reasons we went in there weren't correct, but still it's a good thing," because it's completely changed the balance of power there. Iran now, I would suggest, is in a much stronger position in that part of the world. I think it's allowed them to pursue their nuclear capabilities in a way that they weren't able to before. Syria —

Rumsfeld: Oh, I don't think so at all. I think they were determined to have nuclear weapons and they're on that path. It didn't change at all.

Stewart: But doesn't that trouble you at all? If we — you know, the spotlight that we put on the intelligence of Iraq. Let's say we had turned it to Iran. Couldn't you have said, "They pay suicide bombers, they support Hezbollah, they have nuclear ambitions, they have an arrogant dictator who has been brutal to his own people."? Why not topple them? Why not Pakistan? Why not Libya? Why not — there's a guy who committed an act of terrorism over Lockerbie that we know about, had a U.S. citizen, a physician, assassinated. It's very difficult to figure out the rationale — in all that you said about we've been attacked and we had to be careful — I don't believe we're safer from the type of attack that you described — that sort of isolated biological attack, or a small group of people. Nineteen people attacked us on September 11th. Nineteen. For the billions of dollars that we've spent and the lives that were lost, have we made the world a place where nineteen people can't attack us again?? I don't believe we have, and I don't believe we can. And from the sounds of it, I don't think you believe that.

Rumsfeld: Well, let me put it this way: I visited Oman shortly after 9/11 and met with Sultan Qaboos (قابوس بن سعيد آل سعيد). He said, as harsh as it sounds, 9/11 may be a blessing, because it may be the thing that alerts the United States and the world to the dangers of another attack, using weapons of mass destruction, where it's not 3,000, it's 300,000, or 3,000,000 people dead. And now you say, "Well, can we be sure that we can't still be attacked?" No. On the other hand, the structures that President Bush put in place have put so much pressure on terrorists, it makes everything they have to do harder — harder to talk on a phone, harder to move between states, harder to recruit, harder to raise money. They're hiding. And a lot of them have been killed, a high number of Al Qaeda have been killed. Now, terrorists can attack any time, any place, using any technique, and you can't defend it every time, every morning of the day or night or every technique: it's not possible. So we could still be hit, to be sure. But the pressure's there. We haven't been hit for close to a decade; that's worth something, it seems to me. And, who knows what the next one might be. It might not be 3,000, it might be 300,000, and I think the world and the free people of the world need to understand that there are radicals out there who are determined to do that. We know that. They go on video and say that! Now, does that mean we can't be attacked? No, you're right; we could still be attacked. It wasn't just 19 people, it was an Al Qaeda network that planned it, structured it, helped these people, trained them, raised money for them, sent them over. It doesn't take a lot of people to kill people.

Stewart: No, I think that's my suggestion. And if I gave you the impression that I don't believe there are radicals out there who are plotting to kill us, that is not my intention at all. My suggestion is perhaps that the idea that we can prevent terrorism —

Rumsfeld: You can't.

Stewart: — by — Exactly. And then, so, by removing régimes that we feel are dangerous and have ties to those organizations, the effort it will take, the money it will take, the human capital it will take, the wonderful men and women that we lose in that fight, does not ostensibly remove that threat or even make us safer — that those are resources and things that we will never get back in this country, that we used for a misguided attempt at creating safety and stability.

Rumsfeld: The President and Colin Powell and the State Department put together a 90-nation coalition — ninety nations — to share intelligence, track bank accounts of terrorists, and we are safer today. There is no question but that we are. Now —

Stewart: Are we safer because of — I guess my point is, yes, we're safer for a lot of the methods, because of the awareness that we have, some of the things that were put in place. Are we safer because of Iraq?? [shrugs]

Rumsfeld: I think so. You know the Duelfer Report after the war. They found chemical capabilities, the people were still together, the precursors were there, his report announced —

Stewart: But the Duelfer Report said he had given everything up in '91 and his biological in '96 and that, of course —

Rumsfeld: — and they had the ability to rapidly build up stockpiles.

Stewart: They said that you could rebuild some of the biological stockpiles in 5 or 6 weeks —

Rumsfeld: Exactly.

Stewart: — but anybody could do that. I mean, that's not just Saddam Hussein. Anybody could do that.

Rumsfeld: No, but he wanted to do it, he was determined to do it, he had used chemicals on his own people — it's not like he was some benign person here. It's on the record.

Stewart: No, not at all. But it's not like we weren't paying attention to that record already. It's just — you know what, we could talk about this all night, and I would, but I just want to tell you this: I really do appreciate you at least having the conversation and having at least the ability to sit and —

Rumsfeld: Why do you say "at least" twice?

Stewart: Nicely done. I really do appreciate it. And I know you have to go and your time is valuable, and I do thank you for being here. Known and Unknown is on the bookshelves now; Donald Rumsfeld. Sir, thank you.

Doing the Right Thing

2011-02-15T01:37:00.000-08:00

Tonight's blog entry is entirely personal. I'm not writing about politics or transcribing somebody else's interview that I thought was important. You might say that I'm bragging on myself in this piece, but I'd say I earned it, because tonight I Did The Right Thing (IDTRT).

I was walking back to Muni at the end of my evening when I saw three people on the sidewalk ahead of me, arguing. I heard what sounded like the man shoving one of the women against the metal cover over a shopfront. I walked around on the other side of the row of parked cars, assessing the situation, and then heard the woman scream, "Give me my purse! Give me my purse!" I found an inconspicuous place from which to observe the altercation and call 911, but did not intervene directly because there did not appear to be any immediate danger of bodily harm. At some point, though, the man noticed me standing there, talking on my cellphone, and he walked off, dropping the woman's bag on the sidewalk. I followed from a safe distance, about 20 or 30 meters back — close enough not to lose him, but not close enough to be in his space. The last time I ran that hard, I was trying to catch the driver that did a hit-and-run on my car. I kept the 911 dispatcher informed of our movements, but before the SFPD found us, I happened upon two UCSF patrol cars. I shouted, "Help! Police! Help!" and the police officers detained the suspect. I am told they also found the woman and got her account of the whole scenario.

It's been over an hour and a half, and my heart is only now slowing back to normal. I was so out of it that I spaced right through my Muni station, and just barely caught the last train back. Wow.

Full transcript of Obama on Daily Show

2010-10-27T23:33:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama was the special guest for the entirety of tonight's Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. The full transcript follows below the fold, along with embedded video clips. The interview is in three segments.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Barack Obama Pt. 1

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Rally to Restore Sanity

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Barack Obama Pt. 2

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Rally to Restore Sanity

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Barack Obama Pt. 3

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Rally to Restore Sanity

Jon Stewart: Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

["Hail to the Chief," audience cheers]

President Barack Obama: Thank you! Thank you very much.

Stewart: Please have a seat.

Obama: Thank you. [audience cheers and applause] Thank you.

Stewart: I'm sorry; that's all the time we have. [laughter] Thank you for joining us.

Obama: This is a nice set.

Stewart: Thank you very much.

Obama: It reminds me of the convention.

Stewart: We actually bought it. It was in a warehouse and we bought it. We had it chiseled. Let me give you "Mug Force One." This is yours.

Obama: Oh, nice.

Stewart: There's no water in it; let me get some for you. I'll get that on the thing there. Thank you so much for comin' by. There you go. [hands him the mug]

[audience cheers]

Stewart: Does that happen to you wherever you go? Is that just a wild — 'cause when you guys [gestures to audience] go to work, do people typically applaud? It's a nice feeling.

Obama: It was a wonderful welcome. It does not happen, for example, when I go to the Republican caucus meetings.

Stewart: I see; slightly different. So here you are —

Obama: Here I am.

Stewart: — you're two years into your administration, and the question that arises in my mind: Are we the people we were waiting for? [laughter] Or, does it turn out those people are still out there and we don't have their number? How are you feeling about that?

Obama: Well, you know, I'm feeling great about where the American people are, considering what we've gone through. I mean, we've gone through the two toughest years of any time since the Great Depression, and in light of that, the fact that people have been resilient, that folks are still out there workin' and opening businesses and, you know, workin' in the community, lookin' after their families, taking care of their responsibilities: that's encouraging. So, there's still a lot of good stuff happening, but people are frustrated. You know, a lot of people are hurtin' out there, still, and, you know, in that environment, I think they're hoping that we can do a little bit better, here in Washington, than we've been doin'.

Stewart: Now, does that — do you feel that as well? Because it is — you know, you're coming from a place, you ran on very high rhetoric, "Hope and Change," and the Democrats this year seem to be running on, "Please, baby, one more chance!" [laughter] Now, how did we go, in two years, from "Hope and Change: We are the People We've Been Looking For" to "You're not gonna give them the keys, are you?" Is it — are you disappointed in how it's gone? Are you surprised that other people — even your base — can be disappointed? Or do you reject that narrative?

Obama: You know, look: when I won and we started the transition, and we looked at what was happening in the economy, a whole bunch of my political folks came up and said, "You know what: enjoy this now, because two years from now, folks are gonna be frustrated." And that is in fact what's happened. When you've got 9.6% unemployment, when folks are seeing their homes under water, when the economy is growing but is still not growing as fast as it needs to to make up for the 8 million jobs that were lost — yup, folks are gonna be frustrated, and that's gonna reflect itself in the political environment. But, having said that, I look over the last 18 months and I say, we prevented a second Great Depression, we've stabilized the economy — an economy that was shrinking is now growing — we've got 9 months of consecutive private-sector job growth, we have passed historic healthcare reform, historic financial regulatory reform, we have done things that some folks don't even know about —

Stewart: What have you done that we don't know about? [laughter] Are you planning a surprise party for us? "Filled with jobs and healthcare!"

Obama: When you look at what we've done in terms of making sure that — before we even passed healthcare, 4 million kids got health insurance that didn't have it before, through the children's health insurance program [cheers], expanded national service more than at any time since the beginning of the Peace Corps, made sure that credit card companies couldn't jack up your rates without notice — over and over again, we have moved forward an agenda that is making a difference in people's lives each and every day. Now, is it enough? No. And so I expect, and I think most Democrats out there expect, that people want to see more progress.

Stewart: Right.

Obama: But certainly in terms of the folks who voted for me, my expectation and hope is, if you look at the track record that we've accomplished in very difficult circumstances over the last 18 months, we have done an awful lot that we talked about during the campaign, and we're gonna do more in the years to come.

Stewart: Well, that's what we'll do, we're gonna take a commercial break and we're gonna come back and talk a little bit about how that progress will be or what the process was like; we'll be back with President Barack Obama. [cheers]

[commercial break]

Stewart: You know, you were talking about a list of accomplishments that you feel very proud of for the Democratic Party; they don't seem to be running on the list of accomplishments. If anything — you know, I saw a commercial for a guy running for Senate in West Virginia — Manchin —

Obama: He shot the thing.

Stewart: — he took a rifle and he shot the "Cap and Trade" bill. And I thought, "Oh, gosh, the Republicans are so — oh, that's a Democrat?? Oh, that's interesting." Have you convinced your own party that the legislative progress has been enough, and how do you feel about their reaction to it?

Obama: Look: let me say this about members of Congress —

Stewart: Are you gonna curse?

Obama: No, I'm not gonna curse. [laughter] I know a lot of folks feel frustrated about Congress, about how it operates, the bickering, the weird rules, the filibusters, all that stuff. But the fact is that there are a bunch of folks who, during the course of this year, took really tough votes, that they knew were bad politics, because they thought they were the right things to do. [audience cheers] There were a whole bunch of Democrats — guys like Tom Perriello in Virginia [D, VA–05] or John Boccieri in Ohio [D, OH–16] or Betsy Markey in Colorado [D, CO–04] [audience applause] — who are basically in Republican districts — you know, they won in the big surge that we had in 2008, they knew it was going to be a tough battle, that these are generally pretty conservative districts — and yet still went ahead and did what they thought was right. And my hope in this election is that people who vote on the basis of what they think is right and have integrity and aren't just thinkin' about the next election but are thinkin' about the next generation — that they are rewarded. Now, that's tough in this political process, because you've got millions of dollars of independent money that's pouring into those races, they are being hammered by negative ads every single day, and the question then becomes: Do the millions of voices who came out in 2008, who said folks were interested in fixing our healthcare system, wanted a serious energy policy, wanted the kinds of changes in our student loan program that have allowed millions more kids to have access to college — that's what we ran on, that's what we've delivered, and my hope is that those people are rewarded for takin' those tough votes, and if they are, then I think Democrats will do fine on Election Day.

Stewart: Is the difficulty that you have here the distance between what you ran on and what you delivered? Is that — you ran with such (if I may) "audacity" — so much of what you said was, "great leaders lead in a time of opportunity," "we're the ones we're looking for" — yet legislatively it has felt timid at times. I'm not even sure at times what you want out of a healthcare bill.

Obama: And this is — Jon, I love your show, but —

Stewart: Very kind of you!

Obama: — but this is something where, you know, I have a profound disagreement with you and — I don't want to lump you in with a lot of other pundits — but —

Stewart: You may.

Obama: — but this notion that healthcare was "timid": you've got 30 million people who are gonna get health insurance as a consequence of this —

Stewart: Right.

Obama: — you've got a Patient's Bill of Rights that makes sure that insurance companies can't drop you when you get sick, if you've been paying premiums, that make sure there aren't lifetime limits, make sure kids who don't have health insurance can stay on their parents' insurance until they're 26, and cuts the deficit by over a trillion dollars. This is what I think most people would say is as significant a piece of legislation as we've seen in this country's history. And the notion that — [audience cheers and applause] — but what happens is, it gets discounted because the presumption is, well, we didn't get 100% of what we wanted, we got 90% of what we wanted, so let's focus on the 10% we didn't get as opposed to the 90% that we did. And right now there is a woman in New Hampshire who doesn't have to sell her house to get her cancer treatments because of that healthcare bill. [audience cheers and applause] And she doesn't think it's inconsequential. She doesn't think it's "timid."

Stewart: The suggestion was not that it's inconsequential or that it doesn't help —

Obama: The suggestion was that it was "timid."

Stewart: Timid.

Obama: Yeah, that was —

Stewart: And I'll tell you what I mean, and I don't mean to lump you in with other Presidents. [laughter] But I think if I were to try to coalesce whatever criticism of it may be, it's that you ran on the idea that this system needed basic reform —

Obama: Yup.

Stewart: It feels like some of the reforms that have passed, like healthcare, have been done in a very political manner that has papered over a foundation that is corrupt. And I thought that —

Obama: That I think is fair — here's what I think is fair: that, over the last two years, in an emergency situation —

Stewart: Right.

Obama: — our basic attitude was, We've gotta get some things done, in some cases quickly, that are — in order to do that, basically worked with the process as opposed to transformed the process — and there's no doubt that that frustrated folks. It frustrates me. Look: I would love not to have a 60-vote requirement — which is not in the Constitution, but is in the Senate rules right now — that apply to everything we do, so I can't get a Deputy Secretary of Treasury in the middle of a financial crisis because somebody's holding it up and is filibustering the appointment. So there are all kinds of things that happened during the course of these two years in terms of process that I'd like to see changed. Keep in mind that those areas where we had control over process, we actually made changes, so, you know, we've got a whole bunch of rules about lobbyists interacting with the White House that are very different from any White House before. If somebody wants to come to visit the White House now, that list is given out to everybody. That's a change, but —

Stewart: Did you just invite me to the White House?

Obama: No, no. Because we'd have to disclose it and I don't think you would actually —

Stewart: Right. You don't want people knowing I was over there.

Obama: Exactly.

Stewart: Let me explain more specifically, because I think to say "within the system/without the system," you know, in the healthcare bill —

Obama: Yeah.

Stewart: — you worked within the system. You know, during the campaign there was talk that we were gonna be able to negotiate prices with Canadian pharmaceutical companies —

Obama: Right.

Stewart: — a deal was made with them — $80 billion over 10 years — okay, that seems like a quid pro quo that seemed reasonable, but there's other things with the insurance companies. You know, I was talking with a woman in the audience before the show [audience cheers] but she brought up an interesting point: you know, 2014 is when these exchanges kick in and there will be some kind of price controls, but up until that point there's really nothing in this bill that doesn't allow these insurance companies to raise rates.

Obama: Not true! In fact, what we have done is we have empowered state insurance commissioners to review the rate hikes that are taking place in states — in some states, like North Carolina, they've already used it and rolled back premium increases by 25%.

Stewart: Doesn't that only trip, though, on egregious raises, like 30%? Don't they, you know, if you raise it 30%, so they raise it 29%?

Obama: If the point, Jon, is that overnight we did not transform the healthcare system, that point is true.

Stewart: [laughs] When you put it that way, it seems so petty!

Obama: When I say that — when we promised during the campaign, "Change you can believe in," it wasn't "Change you can believe in in 18 months." It was "Change you can believe in, but you know what, we're gonna have to work for it." [audience cheers and applause] And the history of this country — let me make this point, because I think it's really important. Look: when Social Security was passed, it applied to widows and orphans, and it was a very restricted program, and over time, that structure that was built ended up developing into the most important social safety net that we have in our country. The same is true on every piece of progressive legislation, every bit of progress that we've made. When the Civil Rights Act passed, there were still a bunch of folks down South who couldn't vote. And you know, I'm sure there were a bunch of commentators out there who said, "You know what? This law's not doing the job. There's still folks who aren't able to exercise their franchise." But the point was that we had created a structure, we had put a framework in place, that allowed us then to continue to make progress. That's what we've done over the last 18 months. That's what I expect we're gonna keep on doin' as long as I've got the capacity to do it, as long as I'm President of the United States.

Stewart: All right, sir. We're gonna take a commercial break and come back with more President Barack Obama.

[commercial break]

Stewart: Welcome back to the show President Barack Obama. [audience cheers and applause] You expressed some frustration with those on the Left who are still feeling dissatisfied. Do you think in any way the expectation was something that maybe even you and your campaign created? Were people being naïve, in the sense of — I remember very clearly you said, "We can't expect different results with the same people."

Obama: Right.

Stewart: And I remember when you hired Larry Summers [laughter] — I remember thinking, "Well, that seems like the exact same person," and why would you — so, in some respects, I get your frustration with this idea that, "Well, geez, are you never satisfied?" but again, the expectation, I think, was Audacity, going in there and really rooting out a corrupt system. And so the sense is, has reality of what hit you in the face when you first stepped in, caused you to back down from some of the more visionary — like bringing in a guy like Larry Summers, like —

Obama: First of all, if you look at how we have handled this financial crisis —

Stewart: Right.

Obama: — if you had told me two years ago that we're gonna be able to stabilize the system, stabilize the stock market, stabilize the economy, and by the way at the end of this thing it'll cost less than 1% of GDP where the S&L crisis cost us 2½% of our entire economy for a much smaller crisis, I'd say, "We'll take that," because we saved taxpayers a whole lot of money. And, in fairness, Larry Summers did a heckuva job trying to figure out how to —

Stewart: You don't want to use that phrase, dude. [laughs]

Obama: Pun intended.

Stewart: All right. [audience laughs]

Obama: You know, Larry was integral in helping to think through some really complicated stuff. Now, you know, the notion is, I think, that somehow managing a crisis of this magnitude is a matter of black-and-white and you've got some clear decisions that you can make and here's how you can do it and you shut down these banks and push this stuff aside, and somehow it's all gonna be right. It turns out that, at every juncture where we're making decisions, we've gotta make some calculations. If you shut down this bank, does that mean that you're gonna have a cascade of a hundred other banks that are gonna be shut down? Does that mean that taxpayers suddenly have to pay for all that? Is that gonna cost more taxpayer money? So a lot of the debates that were taking place, in terms of financial regulatory reform, in terms of how to stabilize the financial system, were ones that required some expertise —

Stewart: Right.

Obama: — and Larry helped to provide that. Now, having said that —

Stewart: Yeah. [audience laughs]

Obama: I appreciate your being polite.

Stewart: It's just really hard not to talk! [audience laughs] Just one thing: if they had told you the same thing: stabilize the banks, stabilize the Dow, unemployment will be near 10% — would you have taken that deal?

Obama: You know, if I had the capacity to have prevented the unemployment that happened, basically, before we put our economic plan into place — obviously, we would've done that. But the problem was, we lost 4,000,000 jobs before I was sworn in, 750,000 jobs the month I was sworn in, 600,000 the month after that, and 600,000 the month after that — so most of the jobs that we lost, were lost before the economic policies we put into place had any effect. [audience cheers and applause] But I want to go back to your earlier point, which is this notion that, you know, folks, I think, hoped that we could completely transform Washington. I understand that impulse. There are some very good people here, some good public servants who work very hard. There are some folks who aren't so good, and the culture here is not always real healthy, and we're gonna have to — [audience laughs] — And so bringing about change in terms of how the legislative process operates, in terms of the power that lobbyists have, the power the special interests have — you know, that is a work in progress. It's just not gonna happen overnight. But I don't regret, during the campaign, having said that we can change that process, we can make it more transparent — it's not gonna be ideal — we can reduce the power of special interests, although special interests are still going to have power in a democracy. They're gonna be able to petition their government, like everybody else, and they've got a lot of the lobbyists and a lot of the cash to do it, but we can limit the amount of power that they have. We can make sure that as a White House we are more open than previous White Houses. You know, there are folks, I'm sure, who don't think that we've achieved the ideal. And so, I guess, on all these issues, my attitude is, if we're makin' progress, step by step, inch by inch, day by day, that we are being true to the spirit of that campaign —

Stewart: You wouldn't say you'd run this time as a pragmatist — it wouldn't be, "Yes, we can — given certain conditions..."?

Obama: No, I think what I would say is, "Yes, we can, but — [audience laughs] — it is not gonna happen overnight."

Stewart: Do you believe government is nimble enough to handle these 21st-century crises? Is government agile enough — you said, "We want to build a 21st-century regulatory regime for business" — by the time government builds that, obviously it'll be the 22nd century, but won't they have already started trading molecules in some sort of weird — Does government still have the ability to be agile enough to handle these types of things?

Obama: I think it's a legitimate question. I will tell you that there are a couple of things that have changed in our politics that are gonna have to be fixed. One is the way the filibuster operates. As I said, that's just not in the Constitution. In fairness, Democrats used it when Bush was in office and felt very comfortable using it — although not to the extent that it's being used today. What we've been seeing is unprecedented. And that makes it very difficult for us to move forward in serious ways, and actually reduces compromise, because what ends up happening is that if Republicans know that they can block anything because we don't have 60 votes, then they feel no need to compromise. That means the Democrats, then, their attitude is, "Well, we're not gonna compromise; we can't get 60 votes," and everybody moves in opposite directions. The same thing is true, I think, when it comes to how our districts are drawn. You know, we've got a lot of districts that are so safe — 90% Democrat or 90% Republican — that that also helps to polarize the electorate, so there are a couple of things that are structural that are probably going to need to be changed, but, having said all that, we have made a lot of progress over the last 18 months that, from a historical perspective, ranks up there with any legislative session we've seen in history. And we're gonna have to continue to make some progress on things like energy (which didn't get done), on immigration reform (That did not get done.), and most importantly we've just got to do a lot more work in terms of generating the kind of jobs that ensure we've got a growing middle class and that people are able to live out the American Dream, because right now I think there are a lot of folks who are worried that if we don't make serious investments in education, in energy, in infrastructure, in research and development — that we're gonna start fallin' behind.

Stewart: Well, I thank you for being here, for taking the time — I know you're a very busy man, you've got lots to do.

Obama: Jon, I appreciate this. You know, the one other thing that might've made a difference is if you had held the Rally to Restore Sanity two years ago.... That — [audience cheers and applause]

Stewart: I didn't know you could do that.

Obama: That might've made a difference, but I enjoyed it. Can I just make a plug, just to vote. [audience cheers and applause] Make sure that folks out there —

Stewart: I didn't know where you were going with that. When you said, "Can I just make a plug," I was like, Are you droppin' an album? What's happenin' here?

Obama: Go out there and vote November 2nd. A lot of you have early voting in your states; make sure to make use of it.

Stewart: Thank you very much. President Barack Obama.

Obama: Thank you.

©2010 Comedy Central

O'Donnell rips Palin for "Moron-mongering"

2010-10-13T23:52:00.000-07:00

Well, yes, that would be Lawrence "No Relation" O'Donnell on MSNBC, on his new show The Last Word (10pm E/7pm P), remarking on Sarah Palin's interview on NewsMax.com, in which the ex-gov showed off her knowledge of foreign policy and social issues. I've got a link to the original Palin interview and video link and transcript of the MSNBC clip, below the fold. The "share" link from MSNBC.com came with this introduction:

Lawrence [O'Donnell] and Sarah Palin agree?

It's shocking, we know. The former governor of Alaska makes a strong statement on the separation of church and state, earns herself the Last Word re-write.

My own comments follow at the very end.

Lawrence O'Donnell: Sarah Palin talked to the conservative website Newsmax[.com], which posted the interview with the understated headline "Breaking: Sarah Palin Talks of Armageddon, Obama's Socialism, and Her Thoughts About 2012." Palin warned that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to World War III, and pointed out that Russia plays a critical role in making sure that doesn't happen.

We need to remind Russia that any assistance given to Ahmadinejad — given to Iran — we have to realize that at the end of the day, a nuclear weapon in that country's hands is not just Israel's problem or America's problem, it is the world's problem.

We do need to remind Russia about that. And the good news is, we do. I mean, the President does. And by "the President" I mean every President. Bush did it every chance he got, and Obama does, too. So Sarah Palin is right on this one. Not exactly original, but she is right. And when Palin's right, Newsmax is right to present it as "Breaking News"! She had more to say about war.

I hate war, war is hell, we don't want war, we don't strive for war....

Again, right on target. I agree with her, word for word. And if you don't, I'm sure the History Channel's got some war footage you can revel in right now. Finally, though, Sarah Palin says she is deeply religious herself — technically a Christian not affiliated with any organized religion (like Catholics, Lutherans, or Presbyterians) that might make serious demands on her attention — but she takes an unambiguous stand on the Separation of Church and State:

Americans will never stand for Sharia law being the law of the land. [... jump cut ...] Americans will never stand for this, because Americans are smart enough to know: Sharia law — it that were to be adopted, allowed to govern in our country — it will be the downfall of America. And too many Americans are onto this already and starting to rise up and send that message to our federal officials and say, "No, we will not put up with any hint of Sharia law being any sort of law of the land.

I am so on board with that! Luckily, so were the Founding Fathers; they've got us covered on this one, with a little thing they like to call the Constitution of the United States of America.

I guess I do have one little "Rewrite" note for Sarah Palin. Three little words: "Needless to say...."

That's what most of us say before we say something everyone already knows and agrees with. Of course, saying "Needless to say...." would make some of her statements seem a bit less scary to the very, very few people who can be scared by such innocuous language. And if she is trying to scare people that way, these statements don't qualify for the label "fear-mongering." You can't scare anyone who knows we already have a Constitution, with talk of Sharia law becoming the law of the land! That's not "fear-mongering." That's moron-mongering.

©2010 MSNBC and/or Lawrence O'Donnell. Fair use rationale: furthering political discourse. To my knowledge, no other written transcript of these remarks is publicly available.

LincMad's take on all this:

My apologies for putting the punchline up front as a spoiler, but I just couldn't bury that juicy a lead.

I had a recent experience on Facebook — one of those dreaded political arguments with someone you don't remember, but whose picture, sure enough, is in your high school yearbook — that touched on this scare issue of Sharia law. My classmate, whom I'll call Lenny, posted as a status update a link to a video. Lenny's headline was "Here is a real nice bed time story for you.............NOT !" but what really caught my eye was the link text alongside the thumbnail of the video: "The true Face of Islam•This is how they will subjugate us. Islam and Islamists are raping our civilization and will make us their slaves if we still are complaisantly stupid and do not fight back. Islam is an INVASION. It is a hostile take over...." [note: "civilization" with the US spelling, not the British spelling]

I did actually watch the video. It's a man named Shahid Malik, who was the Labour Party Member of Parliament from a district near Leeds in northern England from 2005 to 2010. In 2007, he became Britain's first Muslim Minister. His first portfolio was international development, which was the focus of much of his remarks at the eerily named "Global Peace & Unity" conference. He bragged about helping direct, over a 3-year period, £370 million to Bangladesh, £480M to Pakistan, £243M to Palestine, over £100M to Yemen, "not to mention Sudan and Somalia." If you add those up, it comes to, as the video subtitles helpfully point out "over a Billion Pounds ££££" — sounds like a lot, doesn't it? But let's put that in perspective: that's about 5.5% of the UK's total international aid budget. Besides being majority Muslim, the specific countries named have something else in common: strong historical ties to the UK as former colonies. But clearly I'm supposed to believe that giving development aid to some of the poorest parts of the world is something other than encouraging stability and reducing human misery, both for the obvious humanitarian reasons but also for the equally obvious reasons of providing less-fertile soil for the seeds of future terrorism.

Malik goes on to give a timeline of the progress so far in the total Muslim subjugation of Britain. In 1997, the first Muslim MP was elected. Over the next four years, their representation doubled, and over the succeeding four years, IT DOUBLED AGAIN. He hoped that in the then-upcoming election they would double yet again, crossing the crucial 1% threshhold — 8 out of 650 seats, "insh'allah." He gazes into his Muslim crystal ball to see the Muslim future of Muslim Britain's Muslimy Muslimness: "At this rate, the whole Parliament will be Muslim!" Well, yes, and sending $5 to the names on that e-mail list will get you rich beyond your wildest dreams.

So, in summary, aside from the obviously tongue-in-cheek remark about the whole Parliament, the video was political pablum of the blandest order. There was absolutely nothing in the video to lose sleep over, and it is as much proof of a Muslim plot to rape our civilization and enslave us as it is proof that Abraham Lincoln faked his own death so he could try out for American Idol.

Okay, so how do I respond? I decided to take the calm, reasoned approach of pointing out that the description of the video was a severe case of false advertising. I said:

The video is thoroughly innocuous, to the level of political pablum. Wow, the UK is going to send more than a billion pounds in development aid over a three-year period to some Muslim countries. That's a small fraction of their total foreign aid budget, and nothing compared to what they'll spend on the military, probably in several of those same areas. Stability is the bedrock of security, and development aid is the cornerstone of stability in developing countries.

As to the increasing numbers of Muslims in Parliament, the remark about the whole Parliament being Muslim is obviously tongue-in-cheek, with the main point being that Muslims are dramatically underrepresented: with 3% of the population, they have less than 1% of the seats. Is there some reason that you think they're NOT entitled to fair representation?

If you truly see that video as frightening, you're nothing short of addled by your own Islamophobia.

The dictionary defines "phobia" as "an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something." The video that you linked to, Lenny, contains nothing whatsoever to support any rational fear of or aversion to anything other than perhaps self-congratulatory political speechifying. Therefore, if you find that video frightening enough that you are fine with forwarding it under the heading of "Islam will rape our civilization and enslave us," then guess what: that is the very definition of Islamophobia. But still, another friend — I'll call him Carl — leapt to Lenny's defense from my vicious liberal bullying.

In calling [Lenny] an "islamophobe" you are merely attempting to dehumanize someone whose feelings you disagree with. The truth is that there has been a debate in Britain as to whether sharia law should be allowed to supersede british law in cases where muslims are involved. The French have outlawed muslim headdress. Europe has legitimate concerns when it comes to people from third world countries who are still culturally living in the middle ages. Left-of-center political pundants enjoy using the term islamophobia. But why is it that this religion (not this people...) seems to inspire such acts of violence worldwide? It is their own job to police their religion and they have not. You would hold them to a different standard than other religions. When christians speak of martyrs they speak of people who have been killed by others, when muslims speak of martyrs they speak of those who have died killing others. You should stay with the facts you first quoted instead of resorting to calling [Lenny] names for his well founded concerns...

So, in other words, "Carl," what you're saying is that I'm a bad guy for calling out Lenny for what is demonstrably the dictionary definition of Islamophobia, but when Lenny says without foundation or reason that Islam is out to "rape our civilization" and enslave us, that's just an expression of "his well-founded concerns."

I could point out that I didn't actually call Lenny an Islamophobe; I merely pointed out that he made an Islamophobic posting. In no way did I paint this as an inescapable part of Lenny's personality; indeed, if I viewed it that way, I wouldn't've bothered to reason with him. However, I think that's the least of the issues with Carl's critique of my response.

There has indeed been a debate over Sharia law in Britain, but only in two specific areas: permitting financial products that comply with Sharia and also secular law, and making some accommodation to Muslim beliefs in the area of family law. However, the Prime Minister's office said it quite well:

There are instances where the government has made changes in regulations, for example to include sharia-compliant mortgage products, but in general terms, sharia law cannot be used as a justification for committing breaches of English law, nor can the principle of sharia law be used in a civilian court. — statement from the office of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, circa 2008-02-08, via Reuters

The idea that Britain is somehow going to impose Sharia law on non-Muslims is beyond implausible; it reads like a bad Dr. Who episode about an alternate universe. On the other hand, yes, France did enact legislation restricting certain kinds of traditional Muslim head coverings for women. And I know that many Europeans — on the political left as well as on the right — are deeply concerned about the influx of Muslims who don't share their traditional European values on issues like gay marriage and topless beaches, not to mention honor killings and forced marriage and stoning adulteresses, and more broadly the societal roles of men and women and God and gods and atheists and heathens. But that is still a very long way from saying that 3% of the population in either Britain or the US is a reasonable, rational threat to stay awake worried about.

Ah, but then there's the issue of the double standard. Am I exempting Islam alone from responsibility for "inspiring acts of violence worldwide"? Well, let's see: do I hold all of Christianity responsible for the small number of nutcases who draw from it the inspiration to go bomb abortion clinics? No, I recognize that the people who take that view of Christianity are a tiny minority, in no way representative of the whole. Human history is full of acts of violence inspired by virtually every religion that has ever existed. A great many Muslims have spoken out against the violence and terror being carried out in the name of their religion — including, by the way, the people behind the Park 51 Cultural Center — but insane "us-and-them" rhetoric like yours, Carl, actively undermines their efforts to, as you put it, "police their own religion."

No, "Carl," it seems to me that you have the double standard, holding the entire Umma liable for the fringiest of its fringes but ignoring the acts of violence carried out in the name of so many other religions including your own. And by the way, I don't think I really qualify as a "pundant." I do, though, qualify as a neutral party in looking at Christian extremists — including people who would apply a particularly narrow interpretation of Christian doctrine as the law of the land — and Muslim extremists. I am neither a Muslim nor a Christian. I do not believe in either religion, but neither am I afraid of those who do.

King Abdullah of Jordan on The Daily Show

2010-09-23T23:59:00.000-07:00

King Abdullah II of Jordan was on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, discussing the current Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the future of the region in an extended interview. Embedded video clips and a full transcript follow below the fold.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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King Abdullah II of Jordan

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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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Exclusive - King Abdullah II of Jordan Extended Interview

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Jon Stewart: My guest tonight is the reigning King of Jordan. Please welcome to the program King Abdullah II. Nice to see you, thank you for coming. Very nice to see you.

King Abdullah II: Thank you.

Jon Stewart: It's funny to see you — you and I are pretty much the exact same age, and our lives have mirrored each other in so many ways: your accomplishments in the army and with your people, you work with poverty, and I bartended in a Mexican restaurant for a while. Do you feel the weight and the responsibility of all that is happening in the Middle East right now? This is such a momentous moment, and you are literally in the middle of it.

King Abdullah II: Yes, because, I mean, there's an opportunity to really change our part of the world around, and to lose that opportunity and to resign our peoples to another decade or two of destruction, weighs on my shoulders, as it does on a lot of people in our part of the world. And if we don't get it right, then I think we're all in trouble.

Jon Stewart: Now, we — you know, people in this region have been fighting each other over this land for — what time is it now? — and the process, they say now, "We have a year" — but isn't the real deadline, the settlements freeze expires in a week?

King Abdullah II: That is what the challenge is today. For the first time, the Israelis and Palestinians are back to direct negotiations. We lost almost 9 months, 10 months, for the moratorium on settlements, which ends on the 30th of September [2010-09-30]. The discussions that we had in Washington started out better than any of us could've expected. Both sides have made a lot of ground, and if the issue of settlements is still on the table on the 30th, then everybody walks away. And if they do, how are we going to be able to get people back to the table? And I don't see that happening in the near future, so, if we fail on the 30th, expect another war by the end of the year.

Jon Stewart: Expect another — ?

King Abdullah II: Expect another war by the end of the year, and more wars that I foresee in the region over the coming years. You're already in two wars in our part of the world, you have troops in two other hot spots, I can see potential crisis #5, 6, or 7 — unless we solve this problem, not only do we as the Arabs and Israelis pay the price for it, but your loved ones in harm's way will continue to be in the trenches with the rest of us, so everything is riding now on whether we can get both parties beyond the 30th, and so much is riding on our future.

Jon Stewart: Does that — laying that on the table, almost, does that put too much power in the hands of those who could easily subvert the negotiations? Because clearly now, you know, facing the unfortunate facts of the region, there are people on both sides who would very much like to see this go away. How fragile is it — the settlement issue — and if that's the issue that turns us to war....

King Abdullah II: Well, we all got painted into a corner on the issue of settlements, unfortunately. And where we should have concentrated is on territories and the borders of a future Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution. So now we've got this unfortunate issue of the 30th of September, and there are people waiting in the wings for us to fail, and we, I think, as the moderates, are becoming definitely the minority, and we're losing our voices, and what people will say as we go beyond the 30th is, "Look, we've been telling you for years now that the moderates having dialogue with Israel is not the way to go. Violence is the only way." And then we run out of an ability to answer the extremists in our region, so I think we're on a defining crossroads, whether we're going to go down the abyss or not.

Jon Stewart: When you talk about extremists — and help us out, because unfortunately for us the delineation now between extremist and moderate is unclear. We think of the extremists as Al Qaeda. Are you talking about the leadership of these countries?

King Abdullah II: We have extremists, I think, all over the world. I mean, if you look at the challenges, unfortunately, there's elements in all three of our religions that are pushing us into the abyss. We have our fair share of them in our part of the world, and they're just waiting for us to fail. The extremists are those that don't want to see Arabs and Israelis have peace, Israelis and Muslims have peace, and that is the major challenge that we have.

Jon Stewart: So, now we've painted only with grays. Give us some color in this. Give us a little bit of autumn color, give us a little bit of spring, a little bit of a green bud that you feel like gives you a hopeful scenario, because right now, I don't mind telling you, I'm a little nauseous. I feel a little nauseous.

King Abdullah II: You know, we're living there and —

Jon Stewart: I know; you're very calm about it.

King Abdullah II: We're kind of used to this, but I think where we are today is that, where are we going to take — what is the next step we're going to take? Our future is either continued war and destruction that's going to bring everybody in, or people just getting to the table. The atmospherics between the two leaders are there — I mean, I saw the sincerity in Washington. We've got a long way to go, but it's not like we're starting from the drawing board. Everybody knows what needs to be done on territory, on refugees, on Jerusalem. And so getting to the end game can be done; it's just, do the leaders have the courage and the backbone to be able to do it? That is what is in question, but again, I believe in humanity, I believe in the people of our region — Israelis and Arabs — that when you put it to the people, "Look, this is the best deal I could get," because there's no way that either leader is gonna be happy with what he gets. At the end of the day, he's going to have to go back to his people and say, "Look, I did the best I could. This is what I have for you. Now, are you gonna vote for peace or are you gonna vote for war?" And I have to believe in humanity, that, you know, for the future of our coming generations, that the overall people on all sides will vote for light and not for darkness.

Jon Stewart: It's gotta happen.

King Abdullah II: It has to.

Jon Stewart: But playing a little Stratego® here — in the region, it feels like two competing powers are going for a moment: Iran and Turkey, to some extent. It feels like they're both kind of competing in this idea of, like, Hey, maybe we're in ascendance, the West is not —

King Abdullah II: That's what people have to understand here. Obviously, you made remarks to Iran. People have found, or certain powers have found —

Jon Stewart: He's not gonna hear that, is he? I mean, he wasn't just —

King Abdullah II: I'm sure he watches you every day, as I do. [Jon Stewart laughs, audience cheers] Look: the problem is, you have non-Arab actors that have realized that to be popular in our part of the world is to hijack the [air quotes] "injustice" of the Palestinians and the future of Jerusalem, and this is why Iran is central — not only to the problems that I think America is facing, but all of us are facing. And this is why they're front and center. If the Israelis and Palestinians sit down and solve the problem, Iran cannot play mischief in our part of the world. The first people that will stand up to Iran and say, "Why are you threatening Israel?" is going to be the Palestinians themselves. But because they have hijacked this cause, their star is up here and we moderates have very little voice to be heard.

Jon Stewart: So in some respect, you know, in some respects you're saying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is kind of the nuclear reactor of trouble within the region —

King Abdullah II: Everything is interconnected —

Jon Stewart: Right.

King Abdullah II: — with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, whether it's Al Qaeda —

Jon Stewart: Won't the extremists just find another excuse? Isn't there always another excuse? Won't they then say, "Well, actually, we were talking about Kashmir; that was the problem"?

King Abdullah II: But it no longer becomes global. What happens is that, if you have a settlement between Israelis and the Palestinians, Al Qaeda, which is an international organization, becomes a domestic issue, because what is their rallying cry? Just as Iran, the plight of the Palestinians and the future of Jerusalem. If they make peace, which allows 57 Arab and Muslim countries to have normal relations with Israel — that's a third of the world — then they have no longer a soapbox to stand on. What happens then is Al Qaeda will be an extremist organization in your country, trying to take over your nation. It becomes a domestic issue, and not an international issue. And that's the big difference. Iran, also: how could Iran — you know, where is Iran now? It has its influence in Iraq, it has an influence in Afghanistan, through Hezbollah they're involved in the Mediterranean, they have good relationships with Hamas, so they're sitting on the Mediterranean because of the Israeli-Palestinian cause. If we solve that problem, they no longer become the big —

Jon Stewart: And that's the largest foundation that we can pull out from underneath them? That's the largest rug we can pull out?

King Abdullah II: You then put them back in their box, you put Al Qaeda back in their box, and all the other boxes. Evil will still persist.

Jon Stewart: It has a way of popping up every now and then, it does.

King Abdullah II: Unfortunately, yes, but it becomes then a localized issue, which then governments, I think, will have to address, and that is reform and restructuring the way the Middle East deals with its people.

Jon Stewart: Boy, if it were to work this way.... Do you have two minutes? Are you in a hurry? Is the king in a hurry? Can you — what I was thinking of doing is, we were going to throw to a commercial and come back and maybe speak to you a little bit longer, if you please, and just put it up on the interwebs.

King Abdullah II: Okay.

Jon Stewart: Uh, hello. We're back. Let me — you know, one thing that I wanted to get across, maybe, to an American audience — and I don't think I realized this — I was reading your interviews — uh, Tiger Beat, those kinds of things — no, I was reading interviews that you've done with American journalists and interviews you've done in your own part of the world, and I was so struck by the difference in tone and the difference in subject matter. Here, they say, "Oh, the Middle East peace process, Jordan is in the middle; what do you think of prospects for the future? What do you think...?" Over there, every single question: "What will you do about Israel's vicious actions against the Palestinian people?" They're very emotional, they're very direct, and it is absolute.

King Abdullah II: Absolutely, and the problem is not just in our part of the world. As I said, this [Israel-Palestine issue] has been hijacked by, in this particular case, some non-Arab actors, but throughout the Islamic Muslim world — that's what I'm saying, 57 Muslim nations, a third of the UN. I mean, I was in India, which is not a Muslim nation, but has the largest Muslim population, and when I met with the Muslim community there, they were saying, "When are you Arabs going to solve your problems with the Israelis, because it's hurting us here in India." So, wherever you go, this issue emotionally resonates far beyond the borders of our region.

Jon Stewart: And what about, even, for yourself: Jordan is in, you know, I would think, a difficult position in terms of the natural resources — I mean, I think you've discovered uranium but you don't have the oil resources — you have a tremendous Palestinian population there, I imagine Israel looks to you as well for a little bit of security as well on that border. What can Jordan do, and what can't you do?

King Abdullah II: Well, I mean, we describe ourselves as between Iraq and a hard place. [Jon Stewart laughs; audience cheers and applauds] And, you know — but to us this is a normal day's work.

Jon Stewart: Right.

King Abdullah II: And because we have I think a very honest and straightforward relationship with the Israelis, built by his late majesty King Hussein and Prime Minister Rabin, and obviously we have such a close relationship with the Palestinians, it puts us in a unique position to be able to help both parties. And, you know, we've had our "two steps forward, one step back," but because their future security is our security, we have a vested interest to bring a "win-win" for everybody here. And it's not just, you know, if the Israelis and the Palestinians — you've got to remember, if we can get past the 30th, which shows sincerity that the Israelis and Palestinians are actually going to move forward, we're then talking about a comprehensive peace, so look to beyond the 30th very quickly, Syria and Lebanon probably being brought into the equation, and the Arab and Islamic world being able to reach out to Israel for the first time. There's something called the Arab Peace Proposal, which has been around for 7 or 8 years — which is signed by all the Muslim countries, including Iran — that says that if you give the Palestinians their future, then we want to all normalize with you. Now, whether the Iranians actually believe it or not, they are actually signatories to that.

Jon Stewart: If that — playing that out, so, Syria walks in; I imagine, then, the support for Hezbollah dries up from Syria and also from Iran. Don't they then immediately go, "All right, then, we gotta go in. We gotta start a war."? If you remove the proxies from these organizations, wouldn't they say — isn't their recourse then — "All right, boys, line it up, let's go"?

King Abdullah II: President Bashar has his own difficult decisions to make. I left from Washington and went straightaway, basically, to see Bashar, to explain to him that I felt that there was sincerity from the two leaders to be able to move forward. I said, "Listen, I'm not asking you to believe me. If we get beyond the 30th, and we can get beyond the settlement issue, then you need to start thinking about your role and how you want to play it." And the message I get from Syrian leadership and Lebanese leadership is that, if the Israelis and the Palestinians can move forward, that shows sincerity on each side that they actually want to solve this problem, then the comprehensive part of it will play and they will want to come on board and solve their problems once and for all with Israel.

Jon Stewart: What role does ego play in — look, at the end of all this, it is a human endeavor, and I wonder in that part of the world, where you see a leader like Saddam Hussein, who clung to power with a bluff, based on his own feeling that, "If I show weakness, I'm done in the region" — in that interplay between Iran and Saudi Arabia — certainly Saudi Arabia's gotta be very nervous about what's happening in Iran — Syria, Turkey — how do you manage that so that everybody is satisfied that they have been respected, and is it possible to satisfy that?

King Abdullah II: It is. Again, we have a lot of our domestic challenges: you know, we have the largest youth cohort in history. We have to come up with 200,000,000 jobs as the Arab world over the next several years, and the only way you're going to do that is with regional stability. So, it's not just the politics — which takes, unfortunately, 90% of our time — but providing a future for the youth of our nations. And, you know, I'm 48 years old; I don't think I'm that old, but 70% of the country is younger than me, and that's, I think, indicative of the whole Middle East. So if we don't solve this problem, we've got another time bomb coming, which is young generation, more and more educated, that want a decent future, that want jobs. And unfortunately it's taking all those resources away because of the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and we're not paying enough time and effort to this younger generation that demands, I think, a good chance at life.

Jon Stewart: How about the United States and our role, you know, within the region? Obviously, we brought democracy to the region — you're welcome! [audience laughs] If there's anywhere else you'd like us to bring it, we'd be happy to oblige — umm, have we — you know, it sounds like your mindset is, if we had focused on Israel and Palestine perhaps a little bit stronger, less on some of these other things, we may have done ourselves a little more good before spreading ourselves somewhat thin. Have we strengthened your hand in the region? Have we hurt your hand in the region?

King Abdullah II: I think with the conflicts that are still ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the lack of ability of moving the Israeli-Palestinian process forward, are weakening the moderates, and I think if this continues, will we as moderate voices be around in 10 years time? I think that is a major issue that people have to think of very seriously. The problem with the United States is, kicking or screaming, this has dragged every single American President into the issue whether they like it or not. And so if you choose to ignore it, it's going to take a war to drag the United States back in, but how many Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs have lost their lives and how much destruction has happened? And that answer changed today. You're actually based in our region: Iraq, Afghanistan. You've got two other countries that you've got people already in, and I see, like I said, #5 and #6 coming very, very soon.

Jon Stewart: The Horn of Africa? Is that —

King Abdullah II: The Horn of Africa. So you're as threatened as we are. If we don't solve this problem, you're going to be in the fight as much as we are, and young Americans will be giving their lives away for something that can be solved between two nations. It just unravels the whole complexity of the Middle East.

Jon Stewart: Is Jerusalem — you know, when you really do try and unravel the politics of it, it comes down to Jerusalem being the seat of power for these three major religions —

King Abdullah II: Isn't that a wonderful thing? [Jon Stewart laughs] If we do it in the right way, I mean, this is the problem —

Jon Stewart: But can any one group have control over — should any group bear the responsibility to have control over a city of that importance, and is there an international solution to Jerusalem?

King Abdullah II: We should all bear the responsibility. This is the symbol, I think, that brings all our three religions together. I think, there's one saying that always sticks to mind: Unfortunately, there's enough religion in this world for us to hate each other, but not enough religion for us to love one another. If you truly believe in God — your God, my God, the Christian God, it's the same God.

Jon Stewart: I'm workin' on Sukkot, so I don't know what I'm doin'.

King Abdullah II: But truly if you believe in God, as we all do, and the Torah, the Bible, and the Holy Qur'an, the basic tenets that binds us all together is the love of God and the love of your neighbor and your brother. And I think this is the symbol in this century to bring the world together, of having all of us working together — and again, homework has been done. There are a lot of ideas out there of how Muslims, Christians, and Jews can run Jerusalem as a symbol of hope, which would have such tremendous impact throughout the world. It is not impossible; a lot of work has already been done about it, and I think that's the future that we have to look forward to.

Jon Stewart: Well, from your mouth to one of those Gods' ears, and I can't thank you enough for coming by. It's a great honor for us; please come by and see us again. King Abdullah II.

Transcript: Dick Armey on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

2010-08-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart's guest on last night's Daily Show was Dick Armey, a Republican Congressman from Texas who served as House Majority Leader and who was one of the authors of the 1994 "Contract with America." Armey is now heading up FreedomWorks, a conservative political group. He has also been promoting himself as a leader of the Tea Party movement.

The interview as broadcast was about 7 minutes long, but the full, unedited interview is available from The Daily Show website. The embedded video clips (in 3 parts) and the full transcript appear below the fold.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Exclusive - Dick Armey Extended Interview Pt. 1

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Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Exclusive - Dick Armey Extended Interview Pt. 2

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Exclusive - Dick Armey Extended Interview Pt. 3

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Jon Stewart: My guest tonight, former Republican Congressman from Texas, served as House — U.S. Majority Leader [Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives], his new book is called Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto. Please welcome to the program Dick Armey.

Sir! Hello, sir. Come and sit. How are you, sir?

Dick Armey (R–TX-26, 1985 – 2003): [inaudible] Howdy.

Stewart: Thank you for joining us.

Armey: Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you.

Stewart: I should've filled this [cowboy hat] with delicious fruit for us. A cornucopia.

Armey: Ohh! Actually, you can water your horse with it.

Stewart: That's why —

Armey: Actually, I brought that for you.

Stewart: This right here?

Armey: That's yours.

Stewart: Thank you so much, because I broke my old one.

Armey: Aah, aah! You gotta — You — You —

Stewart: Oh, this is interesting:

Armey: Yeah, right. Gonna make you smarter.

Stewart: Danny — Danny Feinberg Bar Mitzvah. This is interesting; it's inscribed. No, I'm excited. Which is the —

Armey: Which is the right? There you go!

Stewart: This is correct?

Armey: There you go!

Stewart: I think they [cowboy hats] don't do well with people with long faces.

Armey: You're really doing well, actually.

Stewart: It's always good to draw more attention to my giant, ridiculous head.

Armey: If I leave here —

Stewart: Thank you very much; that's very kind of you.

Armey: If I leave here sayin' you're "all horse and no cattle[*]," at least I'll know you've got the hat.

Stewart: I'm gonna look that up, sir.

Armey: You look that one up.

Stewart: I'm sure that's not nice, but I'll look it up. [places the hat on the desk, crown up]

Armey: Oh, oh, oh — turn it over. Turn it over. There you go. There you go. Now lay it down.

Stewart: Oh, you're not supposed to put it on the thing?

Armey: No, no, no, Lord have mercy! No. Put it —

Stewart: I'm gonna taunt you now, every time —

Armey: You're doin' that, yes.

Stewart: So you do it like this. [places the hat on the desk, crown down]

Armey: That's the way you lay down a Stetson.

Stewart: But in New York City, somebody's gonna look at that and say, "Oh, there's a homeless person" and gonna put money — or, God forbid, bodily fluids — into my hat, and then —

Armey: No, no, no, no.

Stewart: All right.

Armey: The money's all right, actually, but it's the —

Stewart: It's a Reagan hat.

Armey: That actually was made for Ronald Reagan.

Stewart: Are you serious?

Armey: Read it! It says in the hatband.

Stewart: Very quickly: [in Reagan voice] "Mr. Gorbachev...."

Armey: You did well.

Stewart: Thank you. I want to talk about this: Give Us Liberty, and it is a manifesto — a little close to Karl Marx there....

Armey: I wasn't very happy about that —

Stewart: I understand. But it starts with what appears to be an arithmetic formula: "Lower Taxes + Less Government = More Freedom."

Armey: Absolutely.

Stewart: That is the thing. Now, it would lead me to believe that for maximum freedom, you would want no taxes and no government. How close am I to where you are?

Armey: Actually, you're really bordering on the edge of what is called the Armey Curve, because there is a question, and it's being addressed in debate across the world.

Stewart: Isn't that the Laffer Curve?

Armey: No, no, the Laffer Curve is kind of old information. This is, like, real good stuff.

Stewart: Oh, okay. Fair enough.

Armey: Better name.

Stewart: Armey.

Armey: No "laffin'" at the Armey Curve, but at any rate — you know, if you've got anarchy, then you've got a mess, and if you listen to the small-government — Constitutional small-government folks that make up this movement, what they're saying is, "We all understand that we desperately need a good government that clearly focuses on those things that governments must do, and do those things well, and cost-effectively." But our problem is, governments don't always do the things they should do, well, and they mess up other things. Armey's Axiom is, "Division of labor works best when people mind their own damned business." The problem with government is, it's just not very disciplined at minding its own business. Write that down. But so —

Stewart: But those seem like competing ideas.

Armey: No, no, no. No, it isn't. Actually, I mean, it's the most fundamental thing in the world: if you and I were left on a desert island —

Stewart: Now, how would that happen? Why — All right.

Armey: Take delivery lessons from Tom Hanks, and there you are, bang.

Stewart: Boom. All right.

Armey: The two of us and a UPS package.

Stewart: All right.

One of us is going to be the government.

Stewart: How tall are you?

I'm gonna have a gun. [audience laughs and groans] I'm a Second Amendment guy, you know that!

Stewart: All right, but I'm gonna have a boat. [audience cheers]

Armey: I'm gonna shoot a hole in it!

Stewart: I know. Not as long as [inaudible].

Armey: The question is, and the question is being addressed quite seriously, has been addressed, was addressed in the Continental Congress, What is the appropriate balance between the private sector and the government, and what are the necessary tasks that we assign to the government, and how do we restrain government from overstepping? Because government has something that you and I — private citizens — do not have, which is the power to compel people to do what they will not otherwise do.

Stewart: That's right.

Armey: So how do you constrain government? And, of course, the great constraint against excessive government is our Constitution. I like to remind officeholders — there's not an officeholder in America today who doesn't take a singular oath of office: protect and defend the Constitution. Why? Because it's a marvelous blueprint.

Stewart: Right.

Armey: It is the structure of division of responsibilities, authorities, prerogatives, between the private sector and the public sector.

Stewart: Nobody's arguing that the Constitution's not good.

Armey: Oh, yes!

Stewart: The idea is — and I think this is sort of where the rubber meets the road — what you're describing is a very reasonable system of checks and balances and a pendulum swing, but you've written something called a "manifesto," and on it, it says, "Join the revolution," and it speaks of it as though we — you know, have we misappropriated — you know, the [1773 Boston] Tea Party was about taxation without representation —

Armey: The original one.

Stewart: They've gotten the taxation part, but do they understand that we actually do have representation? Are we losing your very cogent — and, I thought, very balanced — argument, with this idea that we're fighting "Tyranny" to "take back" our government?

Armey: I tell ya, if you take a look at these folks, and go walk among them —

Stewart: Yeah — [laughs]

Armey: I think —

Stewart: [laughing] "Walk among them"?

Armey: Absolutely.

Stewart: What, are you Moses, for God's sake? "I have walked among these people. I have seen."

Armey: Trust me.

Stewart: I get it.

Armey: All right.

[end Part 1]

[Part 2]
Armey: The first source of heartburn is TARP.

Stewart: Right.

Armey: And — Now, but —

Stewart: Well — that's not the Garden of Eden, Original Sin — TARP is a long way down the road.

Armey: But, what caused these folks to say, "Hey," you know, like Popeye, "I've had all I can stands, I can stands no more"? I'm going to get out in the street and let people know I'm unhappy with the government.

Stewart: A Democrat got elected.

Armey: Noooooo, absolutely not. No. You take a look at the first real incident of their disaffection was the Troubled Asset Relief whatever [Program].

Stewart: What was the first real big rally?

Armey: The first big rallies came after Obama was elected, but only because Obama campaigned saying, Elect me and I'll give you something different from Bush. All he gave us was doubling down on Bush.

Stewart: Aren't you rebranding Republicans?

Armey: Noooooo.

Stewart: Democrats ran on "I'm not Bush"; aren't Republicans now running on, "I'm not Bush, either!"? "I'm a Tea Partier"; what's different about lower taxes and less government than what Bush said?

Armey: No, no, no. These folks are people who are, in fact, fairly disenchanted with both political parties and officeholders from both —

Stewart: [skeptical look]

Armey: Hey, I was there, man.

Stewart: You're telling me that there is a reasonable amount of disaffected Democrats and —

Armey: If you take a look at, What incumbent officeholder has suffered the most grievous loss at the hands of the grass-roots activists that you all want to call the Tea Party Movement, it's a Republican Senator from Utah, for Heaven's sake.

Stewart: Who wasn't conservative enough.

Armey: He stood up and said, Gee, why me, I'm such a fine fella. How come ya turned on me? They had a chant, and the chant was, "TARP, TARP, TARP." He didn't get it. And what TARP was — the most egregious part of TARP other than this horrible waste of money — was Congress handing over $700 billion to the unilateral action of the Secretary of the Treasury, and that is —

Stewart: So, they're targeting anyone who wanted TARP?

Armey: That's a direct violation of the whole concept of separation of powers.

Stewart: But TARP was not — it's just a program that was instituted on a temporary basis. That is not a permanent entitlement program for our government. That's a temporary program.

Armey: That remains to be seen. Most of us don't believe it's at all —

Stewart: So you believe they will do a TARP every year?

Armey: First of all, insofar as you have —

Stewart: By the way, TARP came about because of some deregulation in the financial markets. Isn't that more freedom for —

Armey: TARP came about because the legacy of 20 years of foolish public policy principally directed at maintaining artificially low interest rates — and I'll lay this at the feet of both parties — gave us this big bubble in real estate that was bound to burst.

Stewart: The bubble was not based on — to use another arithmetic — it wasn't arithmetic home value to mortgage loans, it was based on bundling those and creating these enormous derivatives —

Armey: Absolutely.

Stewart: — creating trillions of dollars of debt when it could've been billions —

Armey: The incentive for which came out of Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac, or whatever. [sic]

Stewart: No. That's not true at all.

Armey: The government sponsored — that guy's got it right, he's got the names backwards.

Stewart: Fannie and Freddie are one small part of it; this came from the bundling of derivatives — Fannie and Freddie weren't even in that game yet. They didn't create those derivatives, that was the financial unregulated Wall Street houses.

Armey: Fannie and Freddie represent a secondary housing market, and they let the public know, let the bankers know — irresponsible bankers — If you bundle up these assets, we will make sure they're purchased. And they did.

Stewart: Were they the main purchaser of them in 2007?

Armey: Probably was; I'm not sure, because by this time they had become —

Stewart: "I'm not sure," to blame Fannie and Freddie — I guess my point is this: this [book] seems like flattery to some extent, to say to people, "Lower taxes and less government — you know better," and then you say, "Well, we do need smart government" —

Armey: Well, wait a minute: who knows better?

Stewart: The people.

Armey: That's the point of the Constitution: it begins with "We, the People" will lend to you elected officials some limited authorities and responsibilities if you can exercise them like responsible adults. Rather than being short-sighted and self-indulgent, taking power onto yourselves —

Stewart: But that's not "tyranny." That's just —

Armey: No, that is tyranny.

Stewart: [drops pencil, puts head in his hand]

Armey: I'll give you a simple example.

Stewart: How is that tyranny?! How is that tyranny, if you can democratically then remove them from office?

Armey: Well, that's what we're about to do! That's what we're doin'! I'm glad you got there! This whole thing is about, "Let's take them out of office! They're a bunch of juvenile delinquents, acting irresponsibly. Let's remove them and" —

Stewart: But here's the difference: let's say America had voted, "You know what? I don't like King George's tax policy on tea. I'm gonna vote him out," and then they vote him out.

Armey: They couldn't.

Stewart: Right. Do you see the difference now, between tyranny and elections?

Armey: I do.

Stewart: Do you see the difference?

Armey: Now, do you see the difference between people who are active —

Stewart: Wait a minute! How are you the messenger for this?? You were a Congressman for how many years? You were the House Majority Leader and then you became a lobbyist!! How are you the messenger??

Armey: Isn't that a remarkable thing?

Stewart: How did you wind up as the messenger of Tea Party, no government, freedom? This seems very opportunistic!

Armey: Could you imagine? No, this is very —

Stewart: I think you might've filled my hat with something! How is this possible??

Armey: This is a remarkable thing. I'm a walking, talking miracle. [audience laughs]

Stewart: [laughs] You've seen the light, brother!!

Armey: Absolutely, brother!

Stewart: Sort of like that thing: "I found Jesus!" When did you find Jesus? "Right after the cops found me!!"

Armey: No, no, no, no.

Stewart: It's the same thing!

Armey: Nooo!

Stewart: Oh, man! You're killin' me here!

Armey: I know it. I'm gonna hit you with a [indistinct] now.

Stewart: Oh, my God! A [same indistinct]!

Armey: All right; get ready.

[end Part 2]

[Part 3]
Stewart: Let me ask you this: what — how is the Tea Party not just a more conservative, purer form of the Republican Party?

Armey: No, no, no, no.

Stewart: It's not? Okay, what's different?

Armey: First of all, the Tea Party is not a political party. We don't trust political parties. Political parties' mission is about political parties. We believe in the American Constitution is the greatest act of entrepreneurial genius for the cause of freedom in the history of the world, and we think people who have the privilege to be elected and given the opportunity to swear an oath to that Constitution, have a duty to fulfill that oath, and they haven't been doing it.

Stewart: I know, but that's just random gobbledy-gook. That's one of those —

Armey: It's not random gobbledy-gook.

Stewart: It is, because it's like this: people who want "limited government" want government limited to what they want it to do. In other words, let me just talk quickly about gay marriage. Do you think that the Tea Party would agree that gay marriage is more freedom or less? Do you think that they would think —

Armey: I think the Tea Party would say we've got more important things to concern ourselves with —

Stewart: But that's a Constitutional issue. That's freedom for one, freedom for all. What about this: net neutrality. Where does the Tea Party stand on net neutrality?

Armey: I'm not sure. We don't discuss these matters.

Stewart: Have you met these people?

Armey: Let me give you one.

Stewart: All right. Give me one.

Armey: All right, let me give you one.

Stewart: All right.

Armey: Because I'm gonna tell you something you didn't know.

Stewart: I would appreciate that.

Armey: Okay. What would you say if I told you that my neighbor, the Christian Scientist, who has never seen a physician in three generations of his family's life, has just been told that if he doesn't sign up for Medicare, he can't have his Social Security? And that, on examination, he's discovered this isn't in the law, it isn't a regulation that was acted upon with proper due process, it's a dang "policy memo" that was written in 1993 and has been enforced by whimsical bureaucrats ever since? Now, that's not tyranny? If you say to me —

Stewart: That's pretty weak tea for tyranny, I gotta say. It's kind of weak tea for tyranny.

Armey: It is, huh?

Stewart: Christian Scientists have to get insurance.

Armey: So, you're saying, "I don't care what your religion's convictions are, you either sign up for this program that you don't want, you don't need, and you won't use, or I'm taking your life's savings, and denying that to you."

Stewart: What would you say to this: being Jewish, and living in a country that has a Kathy Lee Gifford Christmas special — I mean, that — isn't that tyranny?

Armey: Is the government —

Stewart: How come I have to listen to that?

Armey: Wait a minute: first of all, you don't have to listen to it —

Stewart: But that's pick and choose.

Armey: Put it on public television and the government says you must tune in: that's tyranny.

Stewart: So, your tyranny is the government ordering people to purchase health insurance. In your mind, that's tyranny.

Armey: Absolutely.

Stewart: In my mind, tyranny would be the government allowing segregation to occur and not stepping in. So now we have two things. Let's say the government mandates to somebody who doesn't want black people to eat at their restaurant that you have to let them. That's tyranny, isn't it?

Armey: I think that issue has been settled. No, not —

Stewart: But isn't it tyranny?

Armey: Not whatsoever.

Stewart: How is it not tyranny? The government mandating to you, you're part of the White Sandwich cult —

Armey: You're talking about civil rights —

Stewart: I'm talking about the law.

Armey: The Civil Rights Act of 1965, which is the law of the land, passed into law through the appropriate legislative processes —

Stewart: So, you have no problem, as long as it passes through the appropriate process, you have no problem?

Armey: Properly, in accordance with the Const —

Stewart: You have no problem with mandated health insurance for Americans, as long as it is passed through law —

Armey: I think it's bad public policy.

Stewart: Well, that's different than tyranny and unconstitutional.

Armey: But, here's the thing: any time you don't like the law as it is, you have the right to, in whatever ways are legal, to act to change the law.

Stewart: Right.

Armey: And that's what these folks are trying to do.

Stewart: That's the beauty of the Constitution.

Armey: Absolutely.

Stewart: Right. Why is your interpretation of the Constitution the idea that anything I might think the government should do, is tyranny, and anything you think they should do, is patriotism?

Armey: No, no, you're [audience applause] — again, let me just say this —

Stewart: It's a very slippery slope.

Armey: No, it's not. It's a matter of —

Stewart: Yes, it is!

Armey: — difference of — Look: —

Stewart: It's a matter of difference of opinion, and you just said it.

Armey: That's right.

Stewart: Right! But that's not the Constitution! That's a difference of opinion. That's what I'm saying.

Armey: All right, but again I would say, the Constitution of the United States set up a structure of governance —

Stewart: Yes.

Armey: — with legitimate and limited responsibilities to people in the government —

Stewart: Three branches.

Armey: Three branches of the government. They did not say in the Constitution, "The Legislative Branch can cede their responsibilities to control the purses of this nation, to the tune of $750 billion, to one unelected person in the Executive Branch of the government."

Stewart: Well, that would have to then be challenged —

Armey: That's a Constitutional question.

Stewart: That would have to be challenged through the judiciary. That's why they have that third —

Armey: It would be challenged through the judiciary, but it's also something that can be challenged in the electory [sic] process. In the process of deciding what candidates will win —

Stewart: But I don't think anyone disagrees with that.

Armey: — Well, that's what we're doing. Are we not in fact, I say —

Stewart: No, no, no, no, no. I'm saying —

Armey: — We have candidates that we would prefer to see win elections —

Stewart: Right, but I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, I have this sense that people believe this is a new, magical reawakening of Constitutional principle that we have all forgotten. Anybody that believes the government should be involved in Social Security or a safety net or any of those things has "forgotten the lessons of tyranny" and the lessons of the bloody battles and all that, and all you're really saying is, "Hey, man, why don't you elect Republicans?" [audience laughs] That's all you're saying. And then, you know what's going to happen? The same thing that always happens: you're gonna elect Republicans and they're gonna leave office with a bigger government and a bigger deficit, because they always do. [audience cheers]

Armey: First of all, let me assure you —

Stewart: Come on, Armey! Come on, Armey! I am an army of one! [audience laughs]

Armey: Let me assure you that nobody in this movement that I know of has any particular affection for any political party that is winning elections in America today.

Stewart: There's not an opinion poll that's been done on the Tea Party that doesn't show it to be overwhelmingly conservative and Republican.

Armey: Overwhelmingly conservative and hopeful that the Republicans can be responsible in office — as they have been on occasions in the past. Not since I left, but still, nevertheless.

Stewart: [laughs] All right. Can I tell you this, though? I find you incredibly entertaining. [audience laughs] And I do enjoy talking with you, and it's nice. I don't — you know —

Armey: You know what's really stunning me?

Stewart: Let me tell you something I'm a little bit surprised about: I thought you'd be more "cattle," quite frankly. But you know what I'm seeing right now? A lot of hat.

Armey: Thank you, appreciate it. Let me tell you what surprised me: when my guys told me that the punditry watches you to see what's current in America —

Stewart: Yes. I don't think that's true.

Armey: — I figured they understand the American newspaper business appropriately. They got it right.

Stewart: You know the newspaper business is dead.

Armey: It started here [points to his own head].

Stewart: Do you think that this, the Tea Party movement, will break off, or they'll just take over the Republican Party? Do you think they'll break off? Or they'll take over the Republican Party?

Armey: I think we will reform and rehabilitate the Republican Party so that America has in fact —

Stewart: So, you're kind of like MoveOn.org, to some extent, for the Republican Party?

Armey: Except they're wrong, we're right, and that's it.

Stewart: Fair enough. Give Us Liberty is on bookshelves now. Sit right there. Dick Armey, ladies and gentlemen.

Armey: And you buy it.

* The expression is usually "all hat, no cattle," meaning that someone is a faux cowboy, dressing the part but not doing the actual work. The description is especially apt regarding President George W. Bush on his "ranch" near Crawford, Texas.

ACORN's Cartoon Pimp Finds Evidence of Crime

2010-07-12T21:37:00.000-07:00

I was just watching tonight's The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, specifically her excellent coverage of the latest in the scandal of the ACORN "pimp" videos fabricated by right-wing media darling James O'Keefe. Remember those videos Fox News (and others) kept running that showed a guy dressed as a fur-lined caricature of a pimp, going into an ACORN office and asking how to smuggle 13-year-olds into the country to use as child prostitutes? Yeah, totally fake, as it turns out. ACORN did absolutely nothing wrong, if you watch the unedited footage, and was repeatedly cleared of any wrongdoing by multiple federal, state, and local official investigations. The joke may yet be on O'Keefe, although ACORN is unable to laugh from beyond the grave. O'Keefe's own videos, both the edited and unedited versions, are prima facie evidence that O'Keefe appears to have violated California Penal Code, Section 632. O'Keefe is now being sued by Juan Carlos Vera, the San Diego Acorn employee shown in one especially fake-damning section of O'Keefe's fake video.

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The California Attorney General released the unedited video at the conclusion of his investigation. It turns out that, not only did Mr. Vera do nothing wrong — he did not in any way, as O'Keefe and his accomplice claimed, offer to help smuggle child prostitutes into the country. In fact, he did exactly what we would hope for any responsible citizen to do in his position: he gathered as much specific information as he could about the human-smuggling operation O'Keefe claimed to be planning and immediately reported that information to the police. If there had been any actual children in danger, Vera's action would have aided in their rescue.

Not only Fox News, but also many major figures of the national Republican Party, took O'Keefe's edited video at face value and used it to bludgeon anyone who might try to defend ACORN against the demonstrably false accusations. Ultimately, ACORN was so politically radioactive that it was unable to keep its doors open. ACORN was destroyed by LIES, including many lies told long before James O'Keefe, but in some measure by the lies initiated by James O'Keefe and his accomplice.

I guess I just never noticed that footnote on the Ninth* Commandment (*Eighth if you're Catholic or Lutheran):

"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, unless he is a liberal." — God, via Moses, via the "Traditional Values" crowd at the Grand Old Fox News Party

Lastly, I thought I'd assemble a quick summary of Rachel's coverage over the months, particularly for the benefit of the Fox News crowd, who remain for the most part blissfully unaware even of the fact that O'Keefe's charges against ACORN were flatly false.

2010-04-01 Los Angeles Times item on California Attorney General's ACORN report
2010-04-02 Let them eat fake (includes "Rachel Re:" video segment and transcript link, also dealing with the "Climategate" fake-scandal and various other bits of Republican fake-outrage); links from the broadcast
2010-04-06 Context, lies and videotapes — Attorney General clears ACORN in California

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2010-04-07 Context, lies and videotapes: The real Acorn story
2010-06-10 Preshow homework: Acorn (sorta) — link to CA AG's report (PDF)
2010-06-20 The Hill reports GAO clears ACORN — link to GAO report (PDF)

Can't Sum Up in 140 chars

2010-03-30T01:44:00.000-07:00

(A little exercise in flow-of-tweetsciousness blogging...)

My brother cooked the Easter Bunny this year for Passover. The only time in my life I ever cooked rabbit — for Easter Sunday dinner, of course — I wound up in hospital a week later. Probably no direct connection there, but thank goodness I have a brother who can cook a fine rabbit dinner for me when a suitable occasion arises.

Stephen Colbert had a wonderful time tonight with the new "Passover Plagues" finger puppets you could actually purchase this year at Bed Bath & B—. Stephen expressed particular sympathy for the poor maligned "Death of the Firstborn Child" finger puppet. Stephen Colbert is back from hiatus with a tan, and he's gone from Applepious to Libertease, but he makes well-deserved jabs at Rush Limbaugh and Jim "Crème De Menthe" DeMint (R–SC), among others.

Here's "The Wørd" segment, or go to ColbertNation.com to watch the whole episode.

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One quick unsolicited endorsement: I am revisiting the sweet music of my friend Spencer Day's remarkable album Vagabond; "in stores now" (as they say) or on iTunes. Spencer Day is the proof that true poetry can still stand out, and that 21st-century songs can speak to something deeper than "wanna dance?" Modern Jazz isn't usually my style, but Spencer Day's smooth vocals and "genre-bending" scores launch his evocative lyrics over the moon.

Technorati tags: Easter Bunny, Stephen Colbert, Passover Finger Puppets, Rush Limbaugh, Jim DeMint, Spencer Day

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Colbert Distills Healthcare Partisanship (Transcript)

2010-03-01T23:45:00.000-08:00

Quick transcript of Stephen Colbert’s insightful and incisive encapsulation of the sharp differences between Democratic and Republican viewpoints on healthcare reform, 2010-03-01 Colbert Report, copyright ©2010 Comedy Central. Embedded video and transcript below the fold.

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Health Care Marriage Counseling

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There are some people the President will sit down with any time: Congressional Republicans. On Thursday, he held a seven-hour televised summit on healthcare. The only way it could’ve been more boring was if they were curling.

Now, folks, in the end, this summit gave us nothing — other than a tale to terrify generations of children:

I even had one constituent [...] This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister’s teeth. — Rep. Louise Slaughter (D–NY)

And to this day, when the wind whips around the moor, you can still hear the teeth saying, “R-r-remember to f-f-floss-s-s.”

Now, folks, with this “all-you-can-speak-nothing buffet,” I believe we missed an opportunity to end the healthcare stalemate, because, to me, this summit seemed a lot like a seven-hour marriage counseling session. And the reason there was no breakthrough is because one of the parties was not being emotionally honest. And I’m afraid in this case it was the Republicans. You see, Republicans and Democrats are like a husband and a wife. Now, clearly, the Republicans are the man, which means the Democrats are the woman — partly because they have no balls. And they’re in counseling because for the last year the Democrat wife has said she wants to have a baby, which is the healthcare bill, and the Republican husband is just saying what he thinks he ought to say. Listen to Republican Eric Cantor (R–VA, House Minority Whip):

The reality is, Republicans do care about healthcare. — on NBC’s Meet the Press, 2010-02-21

We Republicans care about healthcare, just as the Democrats in this room. — at the Presidential healthcare summit, 2010-02-25

No, you don’t! If you did, you would’ve done something about it in the twelve years you ran Congress. Don’t hide your true feelings, guys! Repeat after me: “FUCK ’EM!” [audience cheers] If those “thirty” “million” “people” want healthcare, let ’em get a better job, or join the Army, or go to Canada, or eat Flintstones^® vitamins — it’s not our problem. Stop. faking. care-gasms. [audience laughs] Who knows — maybe the Democrats don’t want this baby, either. I mean, if they really cared about the uninsured, don’t you think they would’ve tried Single Payer or the Public Option? Hell — they could’ve inseminated themselves with that 60-seat supermajority. It’s like a “legislative turkey baster.” And I’m beginning to think the only one who wants this baby here is the counselor, Dr. Obama. Of course he wants it: as soon as it’s born, they’re gonna name the baby after him.

But, Republicans, I know if you admit you don’t want to be the father of this legislation, you’re afraid people will think you’re a monster. But isn’t it better for people to think you’re a monster than know you’re being dishonest?? So pull out, guys. [audience laughs]

Besides — you’re never gonna get pregnant while both of you are in bed with the insurance companies.

Technorati tags: Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert, Healthcare Bill, US Politics, President Obama, Eric Cantor, Republican Party, Democratic Party

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John Yoo on The Daily Show (transcript)

2010-01-12T20:11:00.000-08:00

Last night on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Jon's guest was John Yoo, the Bush Administration lawyer who wrote one of the key documents asserting the Administration's legal authority to employ so-called "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" on prisoners designated as unlawful enemy combatants. In colloquial terms, "The Torture Memo." Yoo asserted that Presidential power, when exercised in his or her role as Commander in Chief, is almost limitless, unbound by Congress, the Courts, treaties, or even the Constitution itself. He further claimed that virtually any maltreatment short of major organ failure could pass the legal test of not being "torture" under applicable law. The interview was lengthy, just over 26 minutes in total, so it was edited for the telecast; however, the entire unedited interview is available on TheDailyShow.com, and a full transcript of the entire interview follows, along with embedded video, below the fold.

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(Jump to part 1 of the transcript)

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Exclusive - John Yoo Extended Interview Pt. 2

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(jump to part 2 of the transcript)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Exclusive - John Yoo Extended Interview Pt. 3

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TRANSCRIPT

Jon Stewart: My guest tonight is a law professor at UC Berkeley; from 2001 to 2003, he was Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice. His new book is called Crisis and Command: The History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush. Please welcome to the program John Yoo. Please, sir! [handshake] Nice to see you. Please come and sit.

Uh — there's one thing I've learned from preparing for this interview: I am not a Constitutional lawyer. So much of this is — I don't want to say gobbledygook, but for you, you are infamous. Do you feel that? Do you feel that the name John Yoo, people have impassioned feelings about you without really knowing you? Do you sense that? Do you think it's unfair?

John Yoo: They, I mean, the same thing must happen to you. People have impassioned feelings about you. When I went on this show, my students started e-mailing me, trying to find out how tall you were, how much you weigh, how good-looking you were.

Stewart: The questions, though, are somewhat different than vital statistics. Not so much horoscope stuff. How did you find yourself here? By your own account, by all accounts, you were not high up in the Department of Justice. Where were you — what was your position?

Yoo: I was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General, which is someone who works for the Attorney General, and then the Deputy Attorney General, and then the Associate Attorney General, and then the Assistant Attorney General, and then there was me. But, on 9/11, if you remember, this was going to be an administration that was going to be about domestic problems. They campaigned on not doing any "nation-building," the 82nd Airborne wasn't supposed to escort kids to kindergarten.

Stewart: But you were a pretty low-level guy?

Yoo: Yeah, but what I'm saying is that on 9/11, I was one of the few people with a background in national security, that had heard about military commissions or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] —

Stewart: So you were elevated at that moment; they said, John, you've written about this, come in here. Are you a good lawyer?

Yoo: Do you mean, did Bush ask me that?

Stewart: No, just in general. Are you considered a good lawyer?

Yoo: Well, usually they say, "The people who can't do, teach."

Stewart: Right. But the reason I bring it up is, I read the briefs that you wrote on torture — and, by the way, I didn't finish the whole thing, so don't tell me how it ends —

Yoo: Not well for anyone.

Stewart: But it seems like, in your position there, it seems like they came to you and said, "We would like to be able to increase our interrogation capacity; can we do that?" And you were tasked with letting them do that.

Yoo: Remember the time we were in: this was about one year after 9/11.

Stewart: When was this again?

Yoo: It was that time we're never supposed to forget. [reference to earlier segment of the show]

Stewart: Right.

Yoo: It was that, right after 9/11, and this is not a decision that I would ever wish on anyone to make — not this administration or the last one — and we amazingly captured the #3 guy in Al Qaeda, which is an enormous coup. It's as if Al Qaeda had captured Donald Rumsfeld or Condoleezza Rice, which sometimes people on this show seem to wish had happened.

Stewart: No! Stop it. Only if they were treated humanely.

Yoo: Only if they were prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.

Stewart: Thank you. Thank you. No, well —

Yoo: But this is what happened. This guy was resistant to normal interrogation.

Stewart: Those are not, obviously, legal issues, those are emotional issues.

Yoo: They're emotional issues, but there's a legal issue, which is, there's a statute [18 USC 2340A] that prohibits torture abroad, and so —

Stewart: This is what I'm getting at.

Yoo: They came to the Justice Department — the CIA and the White House — and said, "What are the legal limits of what we're allowed to do in interrogation?" and I said, It's not something that anyone wants to go out and answer, it wasn't anything that I went into the government to do, but at the same time, our government, our country, is under attack. People at the time think that there is going to be a terrorist attack very shortly, and so there's a huge demand to get this kind of intelligence from this top leader of Al Qaeda.

Stewart: But you believe that the reasoning behind it was sound and that we should still be occupying that same place in interrogative practice, now, 8 years after. It's not — you didn't make those decisions based on its proximity to 9/11, you made it based on what you thought was law that knows no event, just Rule of Law.

Yoo: Well, no, the one difference is that you have to be at war. If we're at peace and there's no enemy, then these are not questions we have to think about, these are not rules or questions that ever come up.

Stewart: So, it has to be when you're at war, this is now, but not what you call total war. You have to be at war to be able to waterboard.

Yoo: You just have to be at war to even think of the question, because the President is the Commander in Chief, and those Constitutional powers — described in the book — only comes up during war.

Stewart: Can the President decide we're at war?

Yoo: He can, although Congress can check him. That's another thing I try to explain in the book, is that it's very easy to attack Bush or Obama for being some renegade President, but Congress and the Supreme Court can always put a stop to anything they want to do —

Stewart: — if they know about it. Do they have to know about it? Can the President keep it secret?

Yoo: You know, all they have to do, actually — all Congress has to do is, do nothing. Right? Because they have to fund and approve all these activities, and, as you know, they were all briefed on a lot of these activities —

Stewart: That's a political issue more than a legal issue.

Yoo: No, no, it's a Constitutional issue, because —

Stewart: No, no, I understand. But I guess what I'm trying to get at is, in the brief, everything that you came up with went in the direction of us being able to do more things — the President having more power —

Yoo: Yes.

Stewart: — and it strikes me as odd, because the lawyers that I have traditionally dealt with, try and give you arguments for and against. And it strikes me as — maybe not unique to the Bush Administration, but all the arguments for them come as justifications for what they want to do, not complex, "Well, there's a precedent here that you can use, things that cause 'severe injury,' but the truth is, settled law is you cannot."

Yoo: Well, first thing, let me say, there were no legal precedents or practices ever before this. The question had never come up before.

Stewart: That's not true.

Yoo: I couldn't say, "Look, here are the things that have been decided by courts before about this."

Stewart: Wait a minute, let me step in very quickly. We signed a treaty banning torture, so the question had come up, and we had answered it by saying, "Yeah, we're not gonna do that."

Yoo: The question is, what does the treaty mean? Right, so it wasn't that we were saying —

Stewart: You're saying that when we signed the treaty, it had not come up what it meant; we just signed it.

Yoo: Right, we signed it —

Stewart: We signed that, and maybe some car leasing agreements.

Yoo: I bet you spend more time on your car leasing agreements than on treaties.

Stewart: So, you're saying that, as a country, we had never addressed the question of whether or not we were allowed to torture enemy combatants.

Yoo: No, no, let me be clear: it was the question of what is and isn't torture. We had not ever come up with that, up against that question, as a government.

Stewart: It sounds like, though, what you are saying is, we had never come up with an answer that was sufficient for the Bush Administration.

Yoo: No, no, no, no, not at all.

Stewart: You're suggesting that we had never addressed what torture was.

Yoo: We had not addressed, what is interrogation methods that are short of torture.

Stewart: We prosecuted people for torture during war.

Yoo: I am saying that we had not faced the question of, what interrogation methods do not constitute torture, but go beyond the regular law enforcement methods that we have used in the past.

Stewart: Well, how did we, then, conduct trials for people that had tortured Americans?

Yoo: Because all those cases were ones where what those other governments had done to our soldiers were well beyond the line of what anyone would think were torture. I mean, everyone would agree that things that happened in those other cases in the past, violate the treaty or the statute. The question is a little different, which is, you don't want to violate the ban, but you don't want to say to the #3 guy in Al Qaeda, "You get a lawyer, and you have your Miranda rights, and you have the right to remain silent."

Stewart: Were those the choices, though? Were those the only two choices we had? We had "Miranda rights" or "waterboarding"? We had not allowed any —

Yoo: What's in between, is the question. Now, to me, in my mind, the question is —

Stewart: You're saying that we as a country had not addressed that very issue until they asked you, a year out of 9/11, to figure out what constituted torture?

Yoo: What lies in that area between —

Stewart: How much can we torture?

Yoo: No, no, I'm saying, how much can we interrogate people and not violate the ban on torture?

Stewart: But in your — we're gonna take a commercial break and I'm gonna put my head in ice water [audience laughs] because this makes no sense to me. We're gonna come back with more from former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.

[Part 2] [Jump to part 2 of the video]

Stewart: We're talking with former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, and we were talking about defining torture, and we had never been asked to define it in the sense of developing things that we could do that would not be torture, but would approach — but would be more uncomfortable than talking.

Yoo: That's exactly right. Aside from talking with someone you don't like.

Stewart: So you, the legal scholar, had to come up with, "You can hit them three times with an open hand, but you have to be smiling." [audience laughs] Was that your task?

Yoo: That is kind of what this is like.

Stewart: I know. Isn't it crazy?

Yoo: I'll tell you everything you want to know.

Stewart: I never signed a treaty. But that's what I'm trying to figure out, because there's two issues here. I guess the first is the legal justification. This book, Crisis and Command, basically says, from George Washington on up, the Framers wanted the executive to have immense power in wartime, and that, when the Commander in Chief makes an executive decision, based on national security, he has enormous leeway. Is that correct?

Yoo: Right. And that this comes and goes, so that in periods of peacetime, the Presidency should become a smaller office, and that the Congress and the Supreme Court check it — but the more important thing is that our greatest Presidents are the ones, like Lincoln, FDR, and Washington himself, who did exactly that, and that our worst Presidents were people who kind of shrunk into a shell when they were confronted by great crises and deferred to Congress or the courts.

Stewart: So, but you're not insinuating that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is the equivalent of the Torture Memo?

Yoo: No, no, no, no, no, but —

Stewart: Even though it's using the same executive prerogative.

Yoo: But the Constitutional root of the Emancipation Proclamation was President Lincoln's powers as Commander in Chief in wartime. A lot of people at the time thought it was unconstitutional to free the slaves.

Stewart: Right.

Yoo: I don't know what Harry Reid (D–NV) thinks of it, but, uh —

Stewart: All I'm saying is —

Yoo: But, you know —

Stewart: But isn't that a moot point? Basically what it's saying is, the President can do what he wants. He either does a great thing or a ridiculous thing.

Yoo: Yeah, but —

Stewart: But he's allowed to do it.

Yoo: It's built into our Constitution that he has that power. That doesn't guarantee that the President's gonna make the right decision or a just decision.

Stewart: So why bother coming up with a variety of interrogations that step up to the line, if the President feels it's necessary, why can't he just say, "Do whatever you gotta do to keep us safe"? Why all the ministration about, we were "finely tuning" it to fit with treaties we already had, when you're clearly saying, "If the President says we're breaking the treaty, we're breaking the treaty"?

Yoo: Right. But also it's the President — first of all, that's the question he wanted to ask us. We're his lawyers; you know, the Justice Department gives advice to the White House.

Stewart: He says to you, "What can I do, and can't I do anything because it's wartime and I'm the President?"

Yoo: Yeah. First of all, let me say, I never had this conversation with President Bush. I never met the man.

Stewart: That may be the most fucked-up thing I've heard about this. You never had a conversation with the Commander in Chief. You were tasked with coming up with a policy that pushed us over what many people are comfortable with, in terms of our treatment of enemy combatants, and you never sat in a room with him??

Yoo: No, I've never met him. First of all, I don't think the majority of the American people actually think we went too far, but, you know, who knows, there's polls out on that. [audience murmurs]

Stewart: [shushes audience]

Yoo: Okay, a majority in your audience.

Stewart: By the way, the entire audience tonight is made out of hemp. [audience laughs] No, I think that —

Yoo: I guess they're just like the ones in Berkeley, then.

Stewart: I'm somewhat confused, then, because you make it sound like a "no-brainer."

Yoo: No, no.

Stewart: In wartime, you're allowed to do what you're allowed to do, because you're the Commander in Chief.

Yoo: Apparently these are very hard questions, because it has to be something that's necessary and proportional to win. I mean, the President can't just say, "Oh, it's wartime, I can do anything," like, Richard Nixon can't say, "It's wartime, so I can wiretap the Democratic Party."

Stewart: Why not?

Yoo: Because there's still — the Constitutional power, he's Commander in Chief in charge of a war —

Stewart: Is he allowed to electrocute someone's testicles?

Yoo: No, I don't think so.

Stewart: So, he's not allowed to —

Yoo: That's not necessary. It's not.

Stewart: Why isn't it necessary?

Yoo: You know —

Stewart: What if they don't break using the "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"?

Yoo: Look, I think all these sort of parade of horribles you could have about whether this is torture, is that torture — anybody can come up with all kinds of things. I don't think any of that is necessary to the objective of getting these guys to talk. The President is still —

Stewart: But that's not the point. He could if he wanted to.

Yoo: No, no, no, because I think his power is still limited as Commander in Chief to doing those things that are necessary to win the war — and that's what I describe in the book is, here are all these Presidents who are faced with a Civil War, with the Revolution: they had to take these hard choices, tragic choices about what to do. They tried to do only what's necessary. They're fairly modest when they exercise the power, even though, as you said, it's an expansive and great power, but we want people in the job who are going to exercise it only as far as is necessary to win.

Stewart: Do you understand, the confusion that I'm having is, what you're saying is, the President has to decide how far he can go up the line for what is necessary to win, when he doesn't know what is necessary to win, because we haven't defined the war. Part of the issue here is, the Bush Administration seemed to want to exist in this netherworld of accountability, to say we're at war when it serves their purpose of executive prerogative, but not to say we're at war when that would invoke the Geneva Conventions. To say we're at war when they're allowed to do what they want to do, but then to say, "Well, it's a different kind of war," when that would bring in Congressional and Legislative checks.

Yoo: That's exactly the kind of question that I talk about here [in the book]. That's why I look at the previous Presidents: because they —

Stewart: The answer is, didn't you solve every one of those questions with "more power for the President"?

Yoo: I'm afraid to say, just like the lawyers and attorneys general to Lincoln and FDR did in their day. Right? Look at World War II. Before World War II, FDR violated statutes written by Congress to get us into the war early, to help the Allies. We waged undeclared war with the Germans.

Stewart: I think that's a very selective reading, though, of Presidential prerogative, and, you know, I don't think people would look at the internment of the Japanese as a smart exercise of Presidential prerogative. Our neutrality was a slightly different level, and certainly not at the level of whether or not we can —

Yoo: I agree. I say right up front, you know, FDR made a mistake, Lincoln made mistakes.

Stewart: So, did Bush make a mistake in pursuing, perhaps, inhumane treatment of combatants that, if our soldiers were treated similarly, we would be outraged?

Yoo: Look, I don't think that they made a mistake in deciding to go beyond the law-enforcement paradigm, because it was an unconventional, unprecedented type of war. You're quite right to say, oh, there's —

Stewart: How is terrorism unprecedented?

Yoo: Because we were attacked for the first time by a non-state group.

Stewart: In the 1930's, we had anarchists bomb government buildings.

Yoo: They didn't blow up and kill 3,000 people in New York City, either. They didn't destroy the World Trade Center and try to decapitate the government, either.

Stewart: What?? So, it's all based on how many? So, if you kill a hundred people, can you torture?

Yoo: No, no, this is a question, again, talked about in the book — what is "war"?

Stewart: How frustrating is it to talk to me, because I'm approaching it from — I'm trying to follow a logic, and I guess you're following a legal paradigm? Because I'm not understanding why it's unprecedented. Terrorism has been around as long as people have been around. Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament. We all came to the conclusion that we would not treat prisoners inhumanely. We decided to abandon that, because this was a different type of war. I am not understanding why yet.

Yoo: You don't understand why it was a different type of war?

Stewart: Why we would abandon principles that we have always had in place for this particular —

Yoo: Because — first of all, let me say, I don't find talking to you frustrating. I find it many things, but not frustrating.

Stewart: [laughs] Would you say alluring?

[Part 3] [Jump to part 3 of the video]

Yoo: You're never going to have me on again, are you?

Stewart: I want you to know that this is true curiosity on my part. I am struggling with logic here, in my own mind. I don't understand how the government can say, "We only did this to save lives." Well, if you only — if that's the way you save lives, why did we stop doing it in 2004? See, "This is how we save lives" and why don't we do it to criminals? Why don't we do it to domestic people, and why don't we do it to teenagers, because sometimes kids go into schools with guns? Why don't we do it to everybody to save every life?

Yoo: First of all, these are very good questions. [audience applause]

Stewart: Let me — [rolls his chair back and forth]

Yoo: What were you doing just there?

Stewart: I'm getting a cramp. I'm just so not understanding this.

Yoo: Let me explain. So, first of all — and this does go to the heart of the book — the reason the Presidency even exists at all — you could've had no President in the Constitution. The reason it exists is because the Founders wanted to have part of the government that could respond quickly and effectively to something that isn't foreseen, something that is unprecedented. If Congress — you know, that great deliberative body — could anticipate everything that's going to happen in the future, they could write the laws that way; you would never have — you would never need a President. So, the 9/11 attacks are unprecedented for this reason: they are like an attack that a nation-state would wage against us, but it's not a nation-state. If the Soviets had attacked us in 2001, exactly the same way, no one would doubt that that was an act of war, right? If the Soviets had — you know, if Gorbachev had flown on a plane and blown it up, or flown it into the Capitol, everyone would say, "Oh, we're at war with the Soviet Union." The thing that makes it different and confusing — and it's not that you're confused, it's a tough question, and half the country thinks one thing, half the country thinks another thing — is that our opponent is a non-nation-state. And the reason that makes it hard is that there's no armies to find, there's no territory to capture; the only way we can win is by getting intelligence to stop them from launching the next attack. So, it's very hard for us as Americans — you know, we're used to having these conventional wars where we see the front moving closer and closer to Berlin. That's not gonna happen in this conflict.

Stewart: But you make a lot of assumptions in what you said, and just starting at the beginning: the first is that the Framers created the Executive so that it could be more nimble and wanted to invest it with more power than the Legislative body in times of war. I think that's — you know, you could pick out certain things that some Framers said and others that others said and make that case. The second thing is that the only way to ensure that this would be the best solution to our security problem would be these Enhanced Interrogation situations that we put ourselves in, in a new and unprecedented kind of war. You know, the same executive prerogative that got you to write those memos, got us involved in Iraq.

Yoo: Right, mm-hmm.

Stewart: And so, if the idea is — you could make the case that pulling our troops out of Afghanistan and putting them into Iraq, taking over countries where we feel the régime has failed, and then holding that country with our military —

Yoo: This is the hardest question — I mean, this is the hardest question, and I try to grapple with it at the end. This Presidential power can be used for bad reasons, too, and people can do stupid, dumb things.

Stewart: Did President Bush, in your mind, use his Presidential power for negative purposes, as well, in terms of fighting it effectively? And what would you say were wrong? And what is our recourse to that?

Yoo: Well, first of all, I'm not a strategist. I never was sure about the Iraq War, whether as a matter of strategy — or strategery — it was the right thing to do. [audience laughs]

Stewart: You're the most charming torture author I have ever met. [audience laughs] All right, go on.

Yoo: Actually, we left a space on the back of the book for you, to put that right —

Stewart: No! That's not going on your blurb. But go ahead.

Yoo: So — actually, I completely lost my train of thought.

Stewart: You were saying —

Yoo: As a matter of policy, I don't know whether the Iraq War was the right thing to do, versus Afghanistan; maybe we should've won Afghanistan first and then devoted our resources to Iraq. I don't know. The Constitution doesn't prevent people from making poor decisions. Right? As you say, the same power that gave Lincoln the power to do the Emancipation Proclamation, Nixon claimed the same power when he wiretapped people illegally.

Stewart: Do you see the danger of, when someone suggests that we are in a netherworld between a total war, a real war, and a new kind of war? Because what that says is that Presidential prerogative will never end. I mean, you could make the same argument in the Cold War. We're in a Cold War; therefore, the President — you know, it places so much power within the Executive to decide what is in national security interests, that I don't see how this is feasible within the framing of the Constitution. The Constitution is explicit in war powers, and I'm surprised to see a conservative make that argument, because it's so not originalist. It's saying that, whatever the situation is, the Framers couldn't really anticipate, so they left it up to the President to decide at what point the nation was safe and he could go back to no longer being a king. It just seems shocking to hear a conservative lawyer espouse that theory.

Yoo: So, now you're insulting me.

Stewart: How did I — wait! Where?

Yoo: I'm just kidding.

Stewart: Oh. [audience laughs] I'm not.

Yoo: I take away the word now.

Stewart: [laughs]

Yoo: So, the main point is this: you're right — I do think the Constitution has this element in it, through the Presidency, to adapt to current circumstances, is not just originalist. You know, we don't look at what the President did in 1789 to figure out how to handle terrorism now. I mean, I agree that would be foolish. I guess my final bottom line on this — and I've struggled with it throughout Crisis and Command — was that, in the end, it is still good for us to have the President able to make those good decisions, even at the cost of sometimes having Presidents who make the bad ones. It's worth it to our system to be able to have a Lincoln or an FDR, even if the price is to have someone like a Nixon. Or, in your mind, Bush, or, in Republican minds, Obama. Right? I think that's part of the price we have to have in our system in order to be able to respond quickly to terrible challenges to the country.

Stewart: Okay.

Yoo: There's no perfect system, though.

Stewart: Okay. Well, I appreciate your being here, and I am very angry at you that you caused me to read a lot of legal documents over the past two days, and I have now been practicing these arguments, as they're arguing in the Senate over Star Wars. You know, I'm trying to read this while my son is watching Phantom Menace — my mind is blown, quite frankly. [audience laughs] But I do appreciate — one of the things I want to mention is we — I always like to think that it's very easy to demonize people and actions, and I think it's important that you sit in front of them and have as honest a discussion and as real a discussion as you can — not that informed a discussion, because I do feel not very equipped, historically especially, to handle the discussion, but I hope that people take away from it at least a certain human struggle that everybody faces in these difficult situations to do what they think is best for the country, whether there are disagreements or not, and not to demonize those actions, on one side or the other, because that is way too easy these days, and I don't hate Bush, you, the things that were done. I disagree with certain things, and I appreciate you coming by to discuss them, and I hope some day you get a chance to write humane briefs. [audience laughs] Thank you for coming on the show. Choices and Command is on the bookshelves now; John Yoo!

©2010, Comedy Central. Episode aired 2010-01-11.

Technorati tags: John Yoo, Jon Stewart, Daily Show, Comedy Central, Bush Administration, War on Terror, Transcript, Torture Memo, Enhanced Interrogation, Constitution, Commander in Chief, Presidential Power

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C Street and Uganda's Homosexual Death Penalty

2009-11-30T21:50:00.000-08:00

On tonight's Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel's first guest was Dan Rather, fresh back from Afghanistan. Her second guest was Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, talking about connections of The (C Street) Family and other American evangelicals to the proposed Ugandan death penalty law for homosexuality, which would also imprison anyone who knowingly failed to report a homosexual to the police. Specifically, Pastor Rick Warren (of the Saddleback Church and of the Obama Inauguration ceremony) and Senator James Inhofe (R–OK) have strong ties to Ugandan politics, but have pointedly refused to denounce the proposed law.

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If you missed the live broadcast or the first repeat, you still have one more shot, in about an hour, at 2 a.m. Eastern/11 p.m. Pacific on MSNBC. (The whole show is top-notch TRMS.) Failing that, you can watch the clip here above (courtesy of msnbc.com), and check back here for my expanded comments tomorrow. Rachel also covered several other issues, like Tiger Woods' failure to speak out against the sex trade in Dubai, despite his familiarity with the financially troubled emirate, perhaps because of his financial dealings there.

It's quite simple: advocating the death penalty for homosexuality is so abhorrent that no member of civilized society can stand idly by without at the very least condemning the proposal. President Obama said that he would be a tireless advocate for LGBT rights but yet he failed to speak out against Maine's Question 1; will he also stand idly by when it's not LGBT marriages at stake but their lives? In particular, Kenya shares Uganda's largest border, so it's not unreasonable to think that a well-crafted comment from President Obama, as both Kenya's "favorite grandson" and a sincere Christian, would have some influence. But certainly people with strong ties to Uganda itself must speak out publicly and unequivocally.

Am I right in recalling that The Family held up as role models, not only Hitler and Stalin, but also Idi Amin? Those were all people whom God had "anointed" to have power over the ignorant and unworthy. I'll have to double check with Jeff Sharlet's book and/or past TRMS clips, but I think they did. A bit of digging, and then more to say tomorrow....

Technorati tags: Uganda,
Rachel Maddow, Homosexuality, Death Penalty, C Street, The Family, Pastor Rick Warren, Senator James Inhofe (R–OK)

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Colbert's WØRD on Same-Sex Couples

2009-11-16T23:45:00.000-08:00

On tonight's Colbert Report (Comedy Central), Stephen Colbert used his "THE WØRD" segment to talk about "Skeletons in the Closet": the rights we should or should not give to gay couples. The full transcript and embedded video follow below the fold.

Colbert Report, 2009-11-16, ©Comedy Central

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The Word - Skeletons in the Closet

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Nation, life is full of little ironies, none greater than the fact that God decreed that gays must never marry but then made them such great wedding planners. Gays, I believe thou hast been punk'd. But homosexuals just won't give up trying to create a nightmare future where they live in committed, loving relationships. And they don't care who it hurts, folks. Look no further than Washington, D.C., where, if a same-sex marriage law passes as expected, the Catholic Church has announced that it will be "unable to continue the social service programs" it runs for the city, including shelters that serve "one third of Washington's homeless people." I mean, they have no choice: after all, Jesus said, "If you wish to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor ... unless a couple of dudes register at the Pottery Barn, in which case fuck the poor" ... in bed. (That is my own translation from the Aramaic.)

Now, either these gays are too selfish to see that they're ruining God's commandment to be charitable, or that's part of their plan. You see, gays ruin everything sacred. Just look what Michelangelo did to the Sistine Chapel! They'll never scrub that stuff off.

Well, now they're comin' after the most sacred human act of all, and it brings us to tonight's WØRD: Skeletons in the Closet

Folks, last year Mark Goldberg, a Rhode Island resident and confirmed homosexual —	Skeletons in the Closet
(We have confirmed that, right? Okay, good.) — was kept from claiming the body of his partner, even though the two had been together for 17 years and were married in Connecticut.	Check
Not only was he not allowed to claim the body, he couldn't put an obituary in the paper — although that might just be because there aren't any newspapers left in Rhode Island.	Mafia Wraps Fish in Laptops
So of course the left-wing legislature decided to grant gays "special rights," like "the right to claim the bodies of — and make funeral arrangements for — their loved ones."	[The Providence Journal online, 2009-11-11, by Katherine Gregg]
Typical activist legislature, legislating through legislation.	How a Bill Becomes Bill & Gary
Thank God Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri (R) vetoed the bill, calling it "A disturbing trend ... of the incremental erosion of the principles surrounding traditional marriage." [2009-11-10]	[photo of Carcieri]
Exactly! The gays are always trying to steal the best parts of marriage — you know, like claiming the body of your spouse. This is an assault on marriage from beyond the grave.	Getting Fat Together
They're like gay zombies. They start with marriage, but what they really want is to change our minds. That's right: these gay zombies want our brai-ains. Governor Carcieri knows this is even more important than the sanctity of marriage.	The Sanctity of Buryage
You're married for — what? — if you're lucky, 50 years. You're dead for eternity.	And Talking to Jennifer Love Hewitt
Well, folks, I say God did not intend for death to be between a man and another man. Death is between one man and one very hungry worm.	Lost Page of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"
Now, let's suppose that one day — God forbid! — the governor dies. How is he supposed to rest in peace, knowing that, a couple of plots over, two dudes are being gay-dead?	Gives New Meaning to Headstone
Remember, folks: Jesus said, "What is bound on earth is bound in Heaven." If we bury them gay together down here, they're gonna be gayin' it up in the afterlife. That's not Heaven! Heaven is singing in a choir, in a flowing white robe, playin' the harp — you know, "guy stuff"!	Don't Ask How the Gates Got Pearly
And the governor — and folks, I believe that the governor might not be going far enough. If we really want to protect the sanctity of traditional decomposing, it might be time to bar gays from having funerals. Now hear me out, hear me out: I am not a monster. I am in favor of civil end-of-life ceremonies.	Eulogy Delivered by DMV Clerk
It's just like a funeral, except, legally, you don't have to bring a covered dish. And instead of defiling our traditional graveyards, gay people can have their own same-sex cemeteries. We'll call them "same-eteries."	Totally R.I.P.-ped
All the governor and I are saying is that we shouldn't have to watch these people flaunt their alternative deathstyle. So, no open caskets, and no viewing of the gay deceased, because if gay couples are going to die in accordance with their present legal standing, they need to be dead the same way we want them to live: invisibly. And that's the WØRD.	Skeletons in the Closet

Technorati tags: Colbert Report,
Same-Sex Marriage,
Buryage

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