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Colbert Delivers Vintage Comeback to Antiwar Vet

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Posted on Aug 4, 2006
Colbert interviews Paul Hackett

The ex-Senate candidate and Iraq War vet Paul Hackett asked Colbert, “Do you really think we’re going to spread democracy with the business end of an M-16?” Colbert’s response was classic. Check it out.


Watch it:

Partial transcript: (warning: joke spoiler below)

Hackett: Do you really think we’re going to spread democracy with the business end of an M-16?

Colbert: Uh, I believe we stared democracy with a musket. Okay? Thank you. Red Coats? The Green Mountain Boys gave too many lives at Lexington and Concord for you to denigrate their service to this great nation. You just lost a lot of votes in Vermont, my friend.

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By Maezeppa, August 7, 2006 at 12:22 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

I LOVE Stephen Colbert.  By playing the idealogue, slogan engineering boob, he skewers the conservatives like no other, just lays waste to ‘em.

My husband once said the hard right was so absurd that they were hard to parody and that some might actually take Colbert seriously.  I didn’t believe it until I read some of the above comments.

To you who think Colbert was being serious, please watch his show, and learn.  This man is a national treasure, the Johnathan Swift of our time.

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By Brigham Narins, August 7, 2006 at 10:09 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

I think most of us understand what Colbert is all about. For my part, I reacted seriously not so much to his bit of comedy but to TD’s headline—“Colbert Delivers Vintage Comeback . . .”—which appears to endorse (without irony) the argument and analogy.

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By Bee Brain, August 6, 2006 at 1:41 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

One more once: Colbert is NOT a Neocon! Can’t (some of) you tell that he IS being sardonic…sarcastic…whatever word you want to use! But he is, above all, NOT being serious! He’s as much opposed to Bush as any of us! Have some of us lost our sense of humor…our sense of irony? Or is Colbert just too subtle?
Paul Hackett knows that Colbert is putting him on!

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By Mad As Hell, August 6, 2006 at 8:21 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

Colbert has just done the amazing:

He has given the Neo-Cons justification for supporting the insurgents in Iraq, and Hezbollah!

What an asshole!  The Neo-cons are not only intellectually ridiculous, they are also inconsistent.

Note that the true Conservatives, like George Will and Bill Buckley, have abandoned them with disgust and disdain.  Sooner or later (and I think it’s happening now) they’ll abandon the “my team vs your team” mentality in current politics and start forming coalitions with the Democrats on the things they agree with—like freedom and democracy.

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By Bee Brain, August 5, 2006 at 2:02 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Colbert’s being sarcastic!?! Duh!
Wow! Paul Hackett is an impressive dude! I’d heard of him but, until I saw this video, I didn’t realize how well-spoken he is!

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By mark, August 4, 2006 at 9:25 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

what you guys dont get is that colbert is being SARCASTIC… he is trying to make the right/conservative views look stupid with his rediculous arguments…. jeez, go watch it again.

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By peter, August 4, 2006 at 12:55 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

if Hackett was quicker he could have pointed out that in the revolutionary war we were the insurgents

in the Iraq war we are the red coats

we are not in this war for freedom - here is what we are there for

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F48xNhqzQiA

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By jkoch, August 4, 2006 at 12:37 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

A musket or an M-16 might help DEFEND a democracy from invasion, but not create one in an alien land.  Lexington and Concord were fighs against occupation.

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By Rob Mahoney, August 4, 2006 at 11:04 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

It’s one thing for a group of residents/citizens to battle to establish a way of life of their choosing; it is a totally different thing to have outsiders come into your land to impose their ideas of how things should be.

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By Brigham Narins, August 4, 2006 at 11:00 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

It’s a good line—Colbert is very quick, very smart, and hilarious—but it’s a poor argument. The key word in his remark is “we”: “We started democracy. . . .” We overthrew an intolerable regime. They—Iraqis—have not started democracy: they’ve had an intolerable regime overthrown by outsiders; they’ve had their homes and cities and civil institutions crushed by an alien military force and the factions fighting a civil war.

The analogy with our musket-bearing forebears vanishes immediately on inspection.

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