Penn & Teller: Bullshit, Season 6, Episode 9, "World Peace"

When I heard that the latest episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit was going to be "World Peace", I felt conflicted. Sure, making fun of douche bag hippies is always good for a laugh. However, even though I still think invading Iraq was a good thing, I have to confess that maybe those peaceniks are right about pulling American soldiers out of Iraq. John McCain is nuts if he wants to keep U.S. troops there indefinitely. If the Iraq President told Barack Obama a two year timetable was a good idea, why not do what the Iraqi's want?

Last week I read Ron Paul's book, The Revolution: A Manifesto, and it made a lot of sense. I don't know if abolishing the Federal Reserve would be a good thing, but I agreed with pretty much everything else he wrote. Would adopting Paul's foreign policy ideas really be such a bad idea?

Does the U.S. really need to have troops in South Korea or Germany? It doesn't make any sense at all to mess around in the Middle East, much less give mutually hostile states foreign aid. And when have trade embargoes ever worked? Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't all these diplomats, spies, journalists, and politicians who advocate one form of intervention or another abroad all go to the same universities as the good people who used to run Enron and Bear Stearns? At this point in my life, I've met enough Ivy League grads to truly understand what William F. Buckley meant when he said, "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University."

Some of the ground work for this conversion was laid by two of the smartest people I know: Rocky Bergen and my lovely wife, Lisa. Would Penn & Teller undo the months and years of groundwork that they had unwittingly prepared for Ron Paul? Fortunately, Penn & Teller did no such thing. I got to laugh at the dirty hippies who run Code Pink and ANSWER. I mean, when has dressing up like a circus clown and plastering posters of Che Guevara and Malcom X all over your office ever accomplished anything?

I did have a couple of minor quibbles with the episode. Drawing attention to corruption at the United Nations was good, but it's another example of a topic that would have made a great episode by itself. It would be worthwhile to take another look at the United Nations if Penn & Teller decide to do a seventh season. I think it was great that they chose to interview someone from the CATO Institute. The CATO scholar, quite sensibly, questioned the utility of all these demonstrations and proposed more free trade as way of keeping nations from each other's throats.

However, Penn & Teller left out one important fact: some of the most vocal and outspoken opponents of the Iraq War are, in fact, the same policy wonks who run and work for CATO. The same people who speak out on behalf of free markets also believe in...peace. A lot of libertarians were and still are opposed to the War in Iraq, but the good folks who run ANSWER are determined to make the anti-war tent as small as humanly possible. Penn & Teller could have done a better job of highlighting those issues.

Despite some signs of creative exhaustion (I wasn't that crazy about Episode 7, "Sensitivity Training") Penn & Teller still have a trick or two up their sleeves. Episodes like "World Peace" prove that the duo aren't just spinning their wheels creatively speaking, and can still do interesting, relevant shows.