Jon Stewart had unfinished business to settle on Thursday night.
The host of “The Daily Show” had a rendezvous with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after he made headlines for saying he always doubted that invading Iraq to turn it into a democracy was a good idea.
“I was concerned about it when I first heard those words,” Rumsfeld told the Times of London last week.
“Were you? Well!” Stewart said to laughs from audience. “I think we can file that under ‘Comments That Might Have Been Useful Earlier.'”
Stewart, of course, dipped into the C-SPAN archives and embarked on a systematic rebuttal of Rumsfeld’s claim that he always approached the idea of democratizing Iraq with skepticism while his peers cheered it on.
But after that was done, Stewart admitted that setting “these traps and getting them to admit things is so hollow.” He wondered if it is futile to try and pin people like Rumsfeld down before or after the next disastrous American war.
After saying it was probably hopeless endeavor, Stewart held out hope.
“Never stop trying anyway,” he said. “Because there’s always hope that one day, they’ll think, just for a second.”
And that’s the moment when you push “those motherfuckers” onto an ice flow to the North Atlantic, he said.
Watch the clip:
