Comedian Jon Stewart declared on Monday’s “The Daily Show” that America is going “back to the torture” with the confluence of a newly declassified Senate report on the CIA’s Bush-era interrogation program, the release of a documentary on key Iraq War architect Donald Rumsfeld and the debut of former President George W. Bush’s paintings of world leaders.
Since their stars were crossing once again, Stewart thought he’d check in on how Bush-era officials were “dealing with their twisted legacy.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney recently told students at American University that if he had to waterboard detainees, he would “do it all over again,” prompting Stewart to dub him the “Wilford Brimley of torture.”
The comedian then turned his attention to former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who uses his semantic powers to cast the Bush administration’s torture memos as an “exaggeration” in director Errol Morris’s new documentary “The Unknown Known.”
But Cheney and Rumsfeld were just the “pawns executing the will of the puppet master himself, George W. Bush,” Stewart said. But in contrast to Cheney and Rumsfeld’s non-apology tour, he noted Bush marked his return to the public eye like any “like any non-torturing, war-starting retiree” would — with, like, 30 pictures he painted.
Watch below, courtesy of Comedy Central:
