Parenting & Family Quote by Dennis Miller

Dennis Miller is doing what post-9/11 American comedy often tried to do: launder a political argument through the cadences of a barroom truth-teller. The line opens with a scolding label - "Liberals" - and the loaded phrase "card", as if skepticism about the Iraq War is just a cheap trick. That framing matters: it pre-emptively delegitimizes the factual question (Were there WMDs?) by recasting it as partisan gamesmanship.

Then he pivots into faux candor: "you want me to tell you the truth?" It's a classic stand-up move, inviting the audience into an intimate aside while sneaking in a broad moral permission slip. The real subtext is blunt: outcomes and feelings outweigh verification. "Most of us are not going to care" isn't just an opinion; it's a threat disguised as a shrug - a declaration that accountability can be made culturally irrelevant if the audience is emotionally satisfied.

The emotional payload comes with "those kids smiling on that street again", an image that functions as a trump card of its own. It's soft-focus humanitarianism deployed to eclipse a hard-focus casus belli. The kids are not Iraqis, not Americans, not specified at all; they're a symbol that can absorb whatever the listener needs them to mean: liberation, safety, closure. In the early Iraq invasion context, this is a defense of narrative over evidence: if the story feels like rescue, the missing proof becomes beside the point. The joke isn't really a joke - it's a cultural coping mechanism that turns war into a feel-good callback.