During Wednesday night’s broadcast of The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart lit into longtime nemesis Fox News for waging a “chronically angry war for ideological purity.” He also took Fox to task for claiming that he hasn’t been truthful or fair with his takedowns of the network over the years, instead utilizing deceptive and selective editing to completely hide the context of their quotes. Besides Fox News, Stewart took shots at conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh for claiming Stewart has damaged the Republican brand.
The Daily Show host began the program by reiterating that he will be leaving the program in the near future. He then noted that after he had announced his departure, many in the media discussed the news. This led to a clip of Fox News host Megyn Kelly saying Stewart has not “been a force for good” and complaining about his using video clips out of context. Stewart reacted to this by declaring a “lie-off” and played a six-second Vine showing 50 of the biggest lies Fox has told. The Vine was later tweeted by the show’s official Twitter account.
50 Fox News lies in 6 seconds. (Tap the screen to pause) https://t.co/n0BBeoYCzT
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 26, 2015
The comedian also went hard after Limbaugh. He played a clip of the right-wing gasbag claiming Stewart has damaged the Republican Party’s brand with his show. This was followed by a montage of Limbaugh saying extremely offensive things over the past few years, topped by Limbaugh infamously making fun of actor Michael J. Fox having Parkinson’s disease. After the Fox comment was played, Stewart sarcastically stated, “We poisoned THAT brand…how do you poison a cyanide factory?”
The soon-to-be-departed host then completely tore apart the claims that right-wing media figures have made claiming Stewart lies and completely misrepresents what they say. He pointed out that they pretend to be concerned about truthfulness but really only care about ”discrediting anything that they believe harms their side.” It is all about ideological purity to them. Any time they see something that isn’t conservative enough for their tastes, they attack it and label it as awful or evil.
“They purport to want to fix things. But conservatives are not looking to make education more rigorous and informative, or science more empirical or verifiable, or voting more representative, or the government more efficient or effective. They just want all those things to reinforce their partisan ideological conservative viewpoint. Because in their mind, the opposite of bad isn’t good. The opposite of bad’ is ‘conservative. The opposite of wrong’ isn’t right — well, OK, you get my point — but it’s right-wing.”
Stewart said their issues even go to trivial stuff, showing the network talking heads complaining about American Sniper not getting the Oscar for Best Picture. After playing clips of pundits whining about the film being snubbed, Stewart noted that the director Clint Eastwood has already been honored by the Academy in the past, the film itself was made by the so-called liberal elite, and they went and nominated it for Best Picture, among other awards. This led to Stewart pointing out that if “liberal street cred” were all that was needed to be honored, then his film Rosewater would have been named best film.
Below is video of the segment, courtesy of Comedy Central:
Stewart concluded the segment by stating that conservative media is like a four-year-old who constantly complains and whines until the parent finally caves. He pointed out that many government institutions in this country are doing just that and are caving to right-wing pressure due to the non-stop crying by the right-wing over ideological purity. Stewart then begged people to stop giving in to them, claiming that nothing is ever going to be good enough for them as the anger is constant.
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