Jon Stewart once wrote an essay in which he imagines Adolf Hitler being interviewed by CNN’s Larry King. King is his usual affable self, tossing softball questions to the resurrected dictator (“What’s next for Adolf Hitler?”). Hitler, meanwhile, talks as if he just emerged from rehab. When King reminds Hitler that he is considered a “demon,” Der Fuehrer can only agree: “Guilty as charged. Larry, look — I was a bad guy! No question! I hate that Hitler!”

Wolf Blitzer, another CNN host, could only have wished for such luck during his real-life interview with white supremacist (excuse me, former U.S. Rep.) David Duke. Blitzer’s seven-minute interview with Duke, direct from Iran’s Holocaust denial hootenanny, was Stewart’s farce repeated as history. Blitzer started off as his usual affable self, tossing somewhat harder questions at the former Ku Klux Klan leader (sorry — bestselling author). But Duke was hardly contrite, nor did think he had any reason to be. In their very first exchange, after Blitzer asks if he is attending the conference because he hates Jews, Duke goes into full attack mode:

Well, first off, Mr. Blitzer, I resent the introduction you made of me. You mentioned the Ku Klux Klan 11 times. That was over 30 — well, 30 years ago in my life, and since that time I got elected to the House of Representatives, I became — and I received a full doctorate, I have been a teacher, I have one of the best-selling books in the world.

And you interview many former communists in governments all over the world and you don’t introduce them by saying former communist and certainly not 11 times. I think you’re biased because you’re a former lobbyist for AIPAC. You’re a Jewish extremist, supporter of Israel, so you want to bias anyone who criticizes Zionism.

You get the idea. No matter what Blitzer asks, Duke sticks to a few Big Ideas. The Zionists control the media. Zionist neocons led America into the war on Iraq. The president is a tool of the Zionist media and Jewish fund-raisers. And the Holocaust conference in Tehran was a celebration of free speech, not Holocaust denial.

Blitzer doesn’t argue these points per se — I’m not sure he could have, any more than he could argue with a person who believes he was abducted by aliens or spotted Elvis on the A train. And Duke is adept at wrapping his lies in a cloak of true facts. Blitzer, in fact, edited AIPAC’s newsletter before joining The Jerusalem Post earlier in his career. Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Cheney aide David Wurmser did indeed cowrite a policy paper for Benjamin Netanyahu advocating an aggressive Israeli strategy toward Iraq. And Holocaust denier David Irving is sitting in an Austrian jail for a “crime” — “trivializing” the Holocaust — that would be protected in America under the First Amendment.

To untangle the fantasies Duke weaves from these threads would demand someone a lot more irreverent and a lot less inhibited than Blitzer — in other words, Jon Stewart. Stewart’s success in this age of “truthiness” (a term coined by his protege, Steven Colbert) is his ability to deflate the arrogant, the disingenuous, and the lying. White House spokesman Tony Snow can continue to suggest that the United States is “winning” in Iraq, and all Jim Lehrer can do is trot out an administration critic to say we aren’t. The message? Smart people can disagree. Stewart, meanwhile, looks at the same news conference and signals to his viewers with a puzzled look, or a vaudevillian double-take, the absurdity of Snow’s statements. In this instance, “fake” news trumps “real” news in its ability to get at the essential truth of a a story.

A reckless disregard for truth-telling — whether it’s the Right on Iraq and global warming or the Left on Israel — also exposes the limits of journalism’s cult of objectivity. Journalism considers it “balance” when you trot out two scientists who disagree on global warming. And yet that obscures the fact that the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion sees the clear and present danger of unrestrained carbon dioxide emissions.

That doesn’t mean you deny a forum to those who habitually twist the truth. That puts too much power in the hands of the gatekeepers and underestimates the ability of an audience to understand a twisted idea when they hear one. What’s needed is context, which can take the form of a properly weighted rebuttal and, yes, newspeople who can make clear to an audience that one side is dealing with less than a full deck.

I’m not sure how Stewart would have handled the Duke interview, although you get an idea in the way he “covered” the Holocaust denial conference. In a lightning-fast clip, he introduced the motley crew of neo-Nazis, discredited academics, and conspiracy theorists in attendance, saying, “Anybody who hates everybody was there.” He then gawked as a bearded Orthodox Jew belonging to the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect shook hands with Iranian president Ahmadinejad. “When you are at a Holocaust-denying convention,” he concluded, “you don’t want to be the guy ordering the kosher meal.”

Dr. Strangelove it wasn’t, but as an example of deadline satire it hit its mark. Mockery alone won’t cure hatred, but it proves an effective tool in confronting the Dukes of this world, who make a mockery of the truth.

Of course, Charlie Chaplin was mocking Hitler as early as 1940, and you can see how much good that did. You can’t leave it up to comedians to confront evil alone. You have take their warnings seriously. Chaplin saw Hitler for what he was, although even his artistic imagination failed him when it came to the true depths of Nazi evil. It’s a pity more journalists, world leaders, and well-intentioned citizens didn’t get the joke and take seriously what Hitler represented.