Pinch-hitting for Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, Dean Barnett asked Mark Steyn about John Cougar Mellencamp's recent appearance on Comedy Central's Colbert Report, "where he had a particularly muscular response he had in mind to al Qaeda and 9/11, didn’t he?" Steyn replied:

[Mellencamp] got rather annoyed at the idea that being a pacifist means you’re a wimp. And he challenged Stephen Colbert to I think it was an arm wrestling match as evidence that in fact real men are pacifists. He’d argued that the proper response to 9/11 would have been to do nothing, to have said okay, look, man, you’ve blown a huge smoking hole in the center of New York. But we’re bigger than that, so we’re not going to do anything. And he argued, he was in effect attempting to argue that that was really the manly response. And a lot of these rockers get very twitchy when, as Stephen Colbert did, that you put it to them that this is a rather kind of feeble response when somebody does that to you. And his response, his rather curious attitude then was to offer to arm wrestle Stephen Colbert into the ground. I would have liked to have seen how that would have gone.

Cougar has written several songs that do a reasonable job mining territory long since explored (to death) by Bruce Springsteen. But talk shows really aren't his best medium, it seems.