In doing a segment on Rumsfeld, Stewart did a thing where he wore a military helmet and hid behind some sandbags. Then he did a dumb guy reacting to things Rumsfled said. He took the military helmet for the dumb guy thing. When he came back on he said I don’t know why I took the helmet off to play the dumb guy.
See.
He thinks that the people in the military are dumb.
Actually, it turns out, he was just giving *you * an opportunity to demonstrate your own stupidity; he was, in other words, really calling *you * dumb.
OMFG. OK I’ll spell it out: The joke was ironic “*gee * I don’t know *why * I took off the helmet…” i.e. he was poking fun at the fact that he had to take off the helmet when he was playing the stupid guy or risk being misinterpreted as saying the military is stupid.
And of course the fuckwits have managed to misinterpret him that way anyway.
Maybe its just me, but my Radio Shack Ironymeter registed a twitch reading the OP. 'Course, thats the same place the SDMB buys its servers, so, who knows…
Didn’t Olberman make a point about this recently? If you think Kerry or Stewart was actually calling the troops dumb, then you’re dumb, or a liar, or a dumb liar.
In case the OP wasn’t an attempt at sarcasm – the point of the sketch was that Rumsfeld talks to the troops – and people in general – as if they were stupid. He hasn’t apologized for doing such a terrible job; instead, he said that people just don’t understand his Iraq policy.
The OP is a good example of how lots of conservatives post-Limbaugh have used humor as a rhetorical device. If a conservative says something rude, he claims it was a joke, and complains that liberals have no sense of humor. If a liberal makes a joke, conservatives act like it was meant literally, and whine about how rude liberals are, effectively robbing liberals of the rhetorical use of humor.