Jon Stewart: Harry Truman a War Criminal

UPDATE, May 1, 2009: Jon Stewart apologizes, admits he's stupid.
_________________

Noel Sheppard, NewsBusters, writes:

Although historians have debated the issue for decades, Jon Stewart has no question about this controversial matter: former President Harry S. Truman is a war criminal for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 2
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

Transcript here.

Not all liberals think of Harry Truman as a war criminal.

For example, Bill Clinton greatly admired him. He called Truman his hero.

Speech: 50th Anniversary Truman Presidential Museum and Library

BILL CLINTON: Harry Truman was a hero to me from the time I was old enough to know about politics. I knew him first by word of mouth, because my family didn’t have a television until I was almost ten, which meant that the first time I had a chance to watch politics was the 1956 conventions where I watched President Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson re-nominated and John Kennedy try to become the nominee for Vice President. His loss was the best thing that ever happened to him, as we all know.

What I knew about Truman, I knew from the stories of my family. My family loved Roosevelt and Harry Truman. They identified with Harry Truman because he came from such modest circumstances and because he was for civil rights, something that was relatively rare among white Southerners of modest means and limited education in the ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s. They liked Harry Truman because he wasn’t embarrassed to be bookish. I was the first person in my family to ever go to college, and my grandparents on my mother’s side went to a tiny little school in a town called Bodcaw that still exists and has the same 50 people now it had about 60 years ago. But they prided themselves on believing that thinking was important and that what you knew mattered, and so they admired Harry Truman, and they got me to admire him.

In 1984, I was profoundly honored as a young governor to be asked to speak at the Democratic National Convention, simply to give a tribute to Harry Truman. I did it, and I couldn’t help thinking if we had learned a little more about his politics, we would have been running better than my party did in the 1980s.

In 1992, when I was running for President, we kicked off the general election campaign on Labor Day right here in Independence because I wanted people to believe that if elected, I would try to honor the values, the policy, the direction, and the attitude of President Truman.

As I said, not all liberals think Truman was a war criminal.

Jon Stewart makes Bill Clinton look like a conservative.