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Stewart: White House Demands '100% Fealty' On Iran Damage Assessments
Comedy Central’s The Daily Show may have had the week off, but its podcast, The Weekly Show, did not. On Wednesday, Jon Stewart claimed that the Trump Administration reacted angrily to assessments that suggest the B-2 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities weren’t as successful as advertised not because they were wrong or had obvious problems, but because “they demand 100 percent fealty.”
Stewart lamented, “Just the shallowness, sometimes, of their—that you know JD Vance, people are saying, ‘We're concerned about intervention in the Middle East and how these things can have unforeseen consequences and instability throughout,’ and JD Vance says, ‘Yes, no, we understand that's something the American people are afraid of, but you know the American people never had a smart person before. Now we have a smart person,’ a smart person that thinks anybody that might possibly look into whether or not it was actually obliterated is a scumbag.”
Looking into the matter doesn’t make you a scumbag. However, publishing a report about a leaked assessment suggesting a lack of success but not mentioning that it was “low confidence” while insisting you did might.
However, Stewart wasn’t interested in that and instead rolled on, “Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt comes out and she, they ask her, ‘Was it obliterated?’ And she says, ‘Everybody knows what happens when you drop bunk—everybody knows,’ is what she said. Everybody knows what happens when you have a precision strike with these kinds of weapons. These weapons have never been used before in the history of the planet, but everybody knows what happened.
Leavitt’s comments were perfectly reasonable. For example, centrifuges are extremely sensitive, so the idea put forth in CNN’s article that they were left “intact” after being on the receiving end of 360,000 pounds of bombs was always hard to believe. Now, the UN agrees that Fordo’s centrifuges were taken out.
Nevertheless, Stewart continued his tale of woe, “It's just beyond the silliness, and if anybody pushes back—they demand 100 percent fealty. Anything beyond that sets off anger and frustration because of the fragility.”
It is certainly not the intelligence community’s job to tell the president what he wants to hear. It should offer him their dispassionate opinion, but it should also not be leaking reports to various media outlets to embarrass him, and those media outlets should report on the whole assessment and point out that some of their conclusions are simply hard to believe, not because the White House demands “100 percent fealty,” but because of common sense.
Here is a transcript for the June 26 show:
Comedy Central The Weekly Show
6/26/2025
2 Minutes, 19 Seconds
JON STEWART: Just the shallowness, sometimes, of their—that you know JD Vance, people are saying, “We're concerned about intervention in the Middle East and how these things can have unforeseen consequences and instability throughout,” and JD Vance says, “Yes, no, we understand that's something the American people are afraid of, but you know the American people never had a smart person before. Now we have a smart person,” a smart person that thinks anybody that might possibly look into whether or not it was actually obliterated is a scumbag.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt comes out and she, they ask her, “Was it obliterated?” And she says, “Everybody knows what happens when you drop bunk—everybody knows,” is what she said. Everybody knows what happens when you have a precision strike with these kinds of weapons. These weapons have never been used before in the history of the planet, but everybody knows what happened.
It's just beyond the silliness, and if anybody pushes back—they demand 100 percent fealty. Anything beyond that sets off anger and frustration because of the fragility.
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