In short, no. Keep reading for the long version.

After recently announcing that they would be returning to air, sans writers, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been both applauded and chided by colleagues and TV watchers.

A Facebook group popped up and I had a brief and ill-advised “discussion” with one of its members regarding this. Now I won’t go into the details, but we’ll just say that the people that think that Stewart and Colbert are scabs are being completely irrational.

It seems that they want to paint the WGA strike as if it were the labor union strikes of old, with the poor, working class, farm or auto workers fighting against their corporate masters. This strike is anything but.

First, these are Hollywood writers, not destitute workers that are begging for insurance or a slight pay increase. Second, what they are after is money based on Internet residuals for their intellectual property. It has nothing to do with big business or this whole “us vs. them” mentality. Constantly I was cited with historical examples of the power of labor unions and how they have shook the power structure, blah, blah, blah.

Look, none of that matters. All it takes is a little Spock-like logic to figure out why John Stewart and Stephen Colbert should not be treated like they are scabs or otherwise greedy, evil individuals.

There are other people affected by the strike!

It’s not just the writers, talent and the suits that put together a TV show. There are a whole slew of others such as directors, stage producers, lighting techs, sound techs and a whole cluster of other positions. These are people that in no way have a stake in whether the writer’s get paid residuals or not. These are people that were just busy doing their jobs, but are now put out of work and can’t pay their mortgage or feed their kids because the writers decided to strike.

Other hosts have been criticized for crossing the picket line as if they are doing it merely out of personal gain. Some, such as Dave Letterman and Conan O’Brien, paid their employees out of their own pockets for as long as they could while production was stopped. That can’t last forever though.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert putting their shows back in production allows them to pay all of those crew members that put the show on the air and have nothing to gain from the writers striking. That’s it. Right now the writers are being extremely selfish and I think it is a little unfair to make others starve so that your already sizable income can get a little fatter.

I agree that the writers should earn a percentage off of the money made on DVD sales and Internet broadcasts of their creative property. However, I think there could have been a better way to negotiate that outcome than to affect the lives of so many others that have nothing to gain from the strike.

Yes, historically this has happened in the past. On the Facebook board I was thrown all sorts of facts and figures about thousands of people losing their jobs in past strikes and these are the sacrifices that must be made to “fight the man.” That’s all bullshit and does not matter in this instance. Again, these aren’t desperate farm workers, they’re highly paid and skilled writers. It’s a unique situation which requires a unique solution.

So to all who would call Stewart and Colbert traitorous scabs–shut the hell up!