On apathy

Jon Stewart on PBS, as insightful as ever (this excerpt is from the 19:30 point):

I think, one of the things that I do think government counts on is that people are busy, and it's very difficult to mobilize a busy and relatively affluent country unless it's over really crucial, you know, foundational issues that come to sort of a tipping point...

...Here's the disconnect. It's sort of this odd -- and I've always had this problem with the rationality of it. The president says, we are in the fight for our way of life. This is the greatest battle of our generation and of the generations to come, and so what I am going to do is, you know, Iraq has to be won, or our way of life ends and our children and our children's children all suffer. So, what I am going to do is send 10,000 more troops to Baghdad. So there's a disconnect there, between -- you're telling me this is the fight of our generation, and you're going to increase troop strength by 10%, and that's going to do it. I'm sure what he would like to do is send 400,000 more troops there, but he can't, because he doesn't have them. And the way to get that would be to institute a draft, and the minute you do that, suddenly the country's not so damn busy anymore. And then they really fight back, and then the whole thing falls apart. So they have a really delicate balance to walk between keeping us relatively fearful, but not so fearful that we stop what we're doing and really examine how it is that they've been waging this.