It is to laugh ...

Or else to weep and rage.

Or perhaps, just to rage...

Once again, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show give us what they said, not what they said they said. Rumsfeld claiming "you'd have a dickens of time" finding any time he'd ever been optimistic about Iraq followed by three clips of ... Rumsfeld being optimistic. Rumsfeld claiming the war might last "six days or six weeks." Rumsfeld announcing that American troops were "being greeted not as invaders but as liberators". Rumsfeld lauding the fact that "these people are free".

Then Alberto Gonzales getting what Stewart called "an unexpected softball from McCain": "Do you think that testimony obtained by inhumane means should be inadmissable?" Alberto froze, like a jacklighted deer, for what seemed an interminable pregnant pause ... and then said that we need to have a consensus on what "inhumane" actually means.

And then Condi refused to speculate on what Bush would do "if" Iraq became a civil war: "I'm not going to discuss hypotheticals." (As Stewart said, "to be fair, the last time the White House acted on a hypothetical we invaded Iraq.")

(She then trotted out that tired old story about the Chinese character for crisis. As Mark Liberman said on Language Log months ago

millions of business pep talks have used this rhetorically-convenient deconstruction of wēi+jī as danger+opportunity. Unfortunately, they're all wrong about the linguistic facts.

As Victor Mair put it, in an essay on pinyin.info more than a year ago,

While it is true that wēijī does indeed mean "crisis" and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of "danger," the jī syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify "opportunity." ... The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)." Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry.

Victor goes on to explain that

Aside from the notion of "incipient moment" or "crucial point" discussed above, the graph for jī by itself indicates "quick-witted(ness); resourceful(ness)" and "machine; device." In combination with other graphs, however, jī can acquire hundreds of secondary meanings. It is absolutely crucial to observe that jī possesses these secondary meanings only in the multisyllabic terms into which it enters. To be specific in the matter under investigation, jī added to huì ("occasion") creates the Mandarin word for "opportunity" (jīhuì), but by itself jī does not mean "opportunity."

Thus wēijī is roughly "incipient moment of danger", while jīhuì is roughly "occasion of incipient moment". These decompositions should not be taken too literally, since such compound words acquire their own particular meanings over time. Looking at additional combinatoric possibilities of jī underlines this point. For us English speakers, it might help to consider the role of the core meaning of script in the modern English words inscription, description, prescription, transcription, ascription, conscription. Prescription can mean "medicine", and has script as a slang reduction. But this hardly licenses us to analyze con+scription as with+medicine , and to use this as a rhetorical device to introduce the idea that reviving the military draft would be a healthy thing for the American body politic.

But that's beside the point - she's not the only one who's said this - even Al Gore did.

The point is that once again, The Daily Show is showing us actual footage of what they actually say.

This isn't that hard, obviously. If the fake news can do it, why on earth can't the real news?