Ed Lasky points us to this revealing article from Commentary Magazine's blog by James Kirchick that proves John Stewart doesn't know squat about foreign policy.

The scary part is that Stewart's Daily Show is taken as gospel by millions of under 30 dimwitted Americans who believe the world is straight man to Stewart's comic "genius."

Case in point:

Take, for instance, Stewart's interview last week with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair interview (hat tip: John McCormack). Stewart tries to mock both Blair and President Bush's belief that if more countries become democratic, there is less chance they will war with each other. This is called Democratic Peace Theory, it's been in existence for decades, and is hardly an idea popularized only by rapacious neocons, George W. Bush and Tony Blair. It also, unfortunately for Stewart, has the benefit of being largely true.

In the interview, Stewart thinks he's laid a clever trap for Blair when he brings up the Falklands War, in which Britain fought with Argentina in 1982 over the latter country's invasion of the Falklands Islands, territories belonging to the British, as an example proving the failure of Blair's statement that democracies don't go to war with one another. After a bit of confused crosstalk about which war was in question, Stewart makes clear that he's talking about the Falklands. Blair corrects, "Actually at the time Argentina was not a democracy." (It was ruled by a military junta.) To this, Stewart mutters, "Oh, okay, dammit!" as if he knew this all along and is in on the joke.

Laughs all around. But moments like this expose the paucity of Stewart's (or his writers') basic knowledge about international affairs. It's not the only false assertion he makes during the interview. In an attempt to paint Blair and those who view the world as he does as overly simplistic in their understanding of Islamist terror, Stewart says that Hamas and Hezbollah aren't like Al Qaeda, and could not share that group's goals, because the two Palestinian terrorist organizations are "localized," whereas Al Qaeda has broader ambitions.