Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Kurt Vonnegut on the Daily Show

Kurt Vonnegut has been busy promoting his new book, A Man without a Country, showing up on Bill Maher's show on Friday and on The Daily Show on Tuesday. He had a few choice words about our leadership in Washington. My favorite quotes:

My training is scientific, but I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine Engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this Engineer knows exactly what He or sHe is doing and why and where evolution is headed. That's why we have giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.

Everyone has been so mean about the President lately, as though he had caused the hurricane. He didn't. I'd like to say something good about him: he is not the dumbest man at the top of our government. The dumbest man at the top of our government is the Secretary of Defense. He is so dumb, he thought he could take over a country and its oil, population 27 million Muslims. He thought he could take it over — and the oil, which is what he was after — with a whole bunch of big BANGs and then 200,000 American soldiers who didn't even know how to say "Hello" in Arabic. What a mess he's made! I've wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy, because we're good at it. In democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go, and after 150 years, you have to let your women vote. At the beginning of democracy, quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is OK, and that's what's going on now.— Kurt Vonnegut, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 2005-09-13
You tell 'em, Kurt!

Jon Stewart promised to put up Kurt Vonnegut's list of "Liberal Crap I Don't Want to Hear Any More Of" on the Daily Show web site. As of this writing, I don't see it there yet, but I'll check again in the morning. Those East Coast folks just seem to get a 3-hour jump on us Californians for some reason.

By the way, if you want to know how to say "hello" in Arabic, it does not sound much like "kourat al-qadam."