Framing this in the D vs. R false paradigm is just damned silly. So is commenting about Harding; though I suppose that could be used to make this look like a D/R debate. It certainly shows that trashing libertarian thought is safe enough. But of course the nuking of Japan is a sacred cow. One, there are people still alive who lived through that damned war--and the ones who fought in the Pacific theater will tell you that the Imperial Japanese weren't boy and girl scouts and would have done the same to us in a heartbeat. Two, there has been a load of propaganda on this subject over the last sixty-four years and it has been pretty believable.
FDR called for unconditional surrender by Japan. After he died, a lot of Americans, not just Truman, wanted to hold out for the same. Was that justified? Probably not, but who knows? Does anyone here have the details of the conditional surrender terms Japan was willing to stipulate to? What if they said, you can have all the Pacific just so long as we're able to continue to rape China and Korea? The fact that we were about to screw around and let China go 'red' was irrelevant at the time--irrelevant because it wasn't yet a given.
A second bomb three days later. Yeah, we wanted to test the plutonium bomb on a population, not just the uranium bomb. You betcha. Moral and high-minded? Hell, no. But even so, have you ever stopped to consider that, if we hadn't seen the after-effects of that crap, we probably would have gotten into a shooting war with the Soviets and wiped out everyone and everything but the cockroaches? Is that justification? No, but it certainly is reason to be thankful...
So, Stewart is pwned, libertarianism and Harding aren't sacred cows but Hiroshima and Truman are, and WWII isn't a subject to be trifled with even today. Which could be a useful political lesson for us--we don't help our cause by insisting on making the (rather weak) case that Pearl Harbor was a false flag event. No way to prove it at this late date, and plenty of reasonable doubt (we were so very good at underestimating the hell out of Orientals back then, probably because of the totally irrelevant fact that they tend to be short).
If you want to make a point about World War II, make the point that it didn't justify Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq and/or Bosnia the way its veterans all seemed to think it did. That's useful food for public thought, right there. And we didn't have to commit war crimes for that fact to be true, either.
