I noticed something that completely amazed me the other day on the Daily Show, when Jon Stewart was interviewing former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Jon expressed a sentiment I had heard from someone before. That someone was Michael Savage.
Michael Savage is quite the interesting person. I say this being an extreme, almost Chomskyesque liberal. I’m not sure exactly what his deal is… it almost seems like he was an intellectual who grew frustrated with intellectual elitism and decided to pursue a path entirely the opposite. He holds two masters degrees and a PhD, but after years of frolicing with the visionary beat poet Alan Ginsburg (and allegedly initiating a fair bit of homosexual innuendo with him) Michael Weiner (pronounced “whiner”) changed his name to Michael Savage and became the most prominent voice criticizing George Bush for not being conservative enough.
Throughout everything I’ve heard him say though, one thing struck a chord and resonated with me. That was Savage’s ultimatum to George Bush: “If we’re there, let’s win, or let’s get the hell out of there.” This, unlike anything else I’d ever heard him say, made sense in what he would consider to be my mentally diseased brain. It was a simple point really: the status quo sucks. Something must be done. “The decider,” George W. Bush, has been stuck in a state of perpetual indecision. “Stay the course” is really more like sit on the fence. We maintain troops at levels we believe necessary to keep the country from plunging into civil war, but every day the threat grows worse.
On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart made the same point to Trent Lott. “Don’t you ever want to say to the President… if we’re in for the fight for our way of life… why not send either more people, or get the people out? Doesn’t it seem like he’s saying ‘We’re fighting for our way of life everybody, but… don’t worry about it, I’ve got it covered’”
Evidently, Michael Savage struck a chord with Jon Stewart too (or at least, I can only assume that with his finger on the pulse of political punditry Stewart has seen Savage expressing similar sentiments). And while I expect that this is one of the conservatively acceptable ideas Stewart puts forth primarily to placate his guest’s “interesting” political viewpoints, it’s one he saw enough value in to bring to the attention of the former Senate Majority Leader.
The question is when will Bush stop sitting on the fence. The status quo sucks. Letting Iraq slip into gradual civil war isn’t staying the course. It’s sitting on the fence. It’s ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away.
We need to do something. Either get the job done, or bring our troops home.
January 2, 2007 at 9:35 pm
atoms change everyday and all day