Douglas Feith on The John Stewart Show

I saw this show for the first time last night. It was an uplifting experience. Stewart, for all his political dysfunction - his focus on how he and other anti-Iraq War partisans felt in the run-up to the war about how prudent the option to invade Iraq was, and his unreflective and shamefully childish assumption that the government had a duty at that time to remind Americans that war is risky - was not unhinged by his anger and resentment. Right there on an anti-Iraq War TV show, the reality of the basic anti-Iraq War tenet that the Bush administration lied its way into the Iraq War was brilliantly illuminated and shown to have no basis in reality. Stewart didn't fly off the handle; he could only sit there gazing upon the facts.

Stewart could not protest because he is a reasonable man in spite of his dysfunction. He did not fly into spasms of rage when listening to Feith. It was an example of a non-dysfunctional confrontation of the anti-Iraq War side with what the Bush administration actually did in making its decision to invade Iraq. It is a shame that all anti-Bush demagogues aren't as well-equipped with a deeper core of sanity and temperament as Stewart is, succumbing instead to irrational resentment and hatred.

(I didn't see the entire 20-minute interview available on the Web, but only the edited-for-TV version.)