Straight from Weekly Review's Scrapbook

This past week The Weekly Standard's Scrapbook took pleasure in the great "revelations" that is happening among the might liberals from election year 2004....:

The Scrapbook doesn't make a habit of watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. And neither (so he claims, at least) does the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto. But he does admit to having watched--and recorded--last Tuesday's edition. Which is how Taranto was then able to produce for OpinionJournal.com his truly amazing transcription of Stewart's interview with Nancy Soderberg.

(Ms. Soderberg was a high-level National Security Council aide and U.N. ambassador during the Clinton years.)

Anyhow, Soderberg was on the Daily Show to promote her new book, The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might--the "misuse" she originally had in mind being . . . well, pretty much everything that George W. Bush has done since Soderberg's party lost control of the White House. It seems that Jon Stewart would very much prefer to think that Soderberg's book has the Bush people dead to rights.

But it also seems that neither Stewart--nor Soderberg, for that matter--is any longer all that confident that Bush isn't actually a genius, instead. Relevant excerpts follow:

Soderberg: I think that there is also going on in the Middle East peace
process--[the Bush administration] may well have a chance to do a historic deal with the Palestinians and the Israelis. These guys could really pull off a whole . . .

Stewart: This could be unbelievable!

Soderberg: . . . series of Nobel Peace Prizes here, which--it may well work. I think that, um, it's . . .

Stewart: [Burying his head in his hands.] Oh, my God! He's got, you know, here's . . .

Soderberg: It's scary for Democrats, I have to say.

Stewart: He's gonna be a great--pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, "Reagan was nothing compared to this guy." Like, my kid's gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.

Soderberg: Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's hope for the rest of us.

Stewart: [Crossing his fingers.] Iran and North Korea, that's true, that is true.