Jon Stewart Trashes Fox News and Eric Bolling for Food Stamp Hypocrisy

Last week, Jon Stewart took Fox News Channel to task for their apparent fixation with food stamp recipients being able to purchase sea food with their benefits. The Five co-host Eric Bolling shot back at “dummy” Stewart for those remarks and criticized him for minimizing the problem of welfare fraud. On Thursday night, the feud continued as Stewart responded to Bolling’s “schooling.” Stewart said it was “reasonable” for Fox to be exposing government waste, but that was not why he was making fun of the network. “What we were ridiculing was the way you exaggerate the scope of public assistance abuse through random, often unprovable anecdotes,” Stewart said. Stewart hit Fox for creating the narrative that the poor are “just sh**ty people and those food stamps are just making them sh**tier.” He added that the network had found their “food stamp abuse bigfoot” in a surfer on welfare who has been featured on over six Fox programs. Stewart admitted that there is an estimated $3 billion in welfare fraud. The Daily Show Host then skewered Bolling for supporting what the Fox host called a $4 billion “pittance” in government subsidies directed to oil producers. “What I have learned today from my ‘teacher’ is that $3 billion dollars of taxpayer money is greater than $4 billion dollars of taxpayer money,” Stewart said. Stewart then played a series of clips of Fox hosts and contributors defending “job creators” who are also recipients of government subsidies. “So, what I’m getting from Fox is this,” Stewart concluded. “Exploiting government largess, while morally reprehensible and corrupting for an individual is a-ok for corporations.”

Daily Show Proves America Does Not Have the ‘Best Health Care System in the World’

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You hear it a lot from opponents of the Affordable Care Act: America already has the “best health care system in the world.” On last night’s episode of The Daily Show, Aasif Mandvi set out to dispel this myth once and for all by visiting this country’s version of a “Third World country.” Mandvi began by talking to NYSE Euronext Managing Director and occasional Fox Business guest Todd Wilemon, who argued that Obamacare will cause American health care to slip into “Third World status,” with less choice and longer lines for patients. To see what that might be like, Mandvi traveled with Remote Area Medical’s Stan Brock to a place he thought might be Africa or South America, but turned out to be Knoxville, Tennessee. There, he learned that the United States is actually ranked 37th in the world when it comes to health care, right between Costa Rica and Slovenia. And he got a first hand look at why that is. When Mandvi told Wilemon what he saw right here in America, he left the Obamacare opponent utterly speechless. All he could come up with was, “people do fall through the cracks.” “From what I saw, those are some pretty big fucking cracks,” Mandvi said. “So the worst case scenario for Obamacare is that it gets up to a place where we already are?” And as for Wilemon’s solution for those who can’t afford health care,” Mandvi summed it up this way: “If you’re poor, just stop being poor.”

The Daily Show’s Larry Wilmore ‘Unf*ck’s’ Fox Business’ Slavery Facts

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As Black History Month draws to a close, The Daily Show examined how one Fox Business Network program spent their time discussing the “mythologization” of President Abraham Lincoln, and some reasons why he might be overrated. Vampire hunting and being “kinda racist” were not among the reasons, but rather, Lincoln’s decision not to let slavery “die a natural death.” Daily Show Senior Black Correspondent Larry Wilmore was on hand to respond. Host Jon Stewart played a few clips from the February 15 episode of Fox Business Network’s The Independents, in which Judge Andrew Napolitano and hosts Kennedy and Kmele Foster discuss Abraham Lincoln’s legacy, and all agree that Lincoln gets credit that he doesn’t deserve. First, Napolitano is shown explaining that in Lincoln’s day, “slavery was dying a natural death all over the western world,” but “instead of allowing it to die, or helping it to die by purchasing the slaves and then freeing them, which would’ve cost a lot less money, Lincoln set about on the most murderous war in American history.” Stewart pointed out that Lincoln did propose compensated emancipation, and was rejected, but then played a clip of Napolitano claiming that “it’s not even clear that slavery was the reason for secession, but largely the impetus for secession was tariffs.” Both ideas, Stewart pointed out, are popular in certain circles, but as Wilmore then pointed out, are unsupported by facts, logic, or moral decency. “These people think that Lincoln started the Civil War because the North was ready to kill to end slavery,” Wilmore said, “when the truth was the South was ready to die to keep slavery. You’re welcome, libertarians, I just unfucked your facts.” He also pointed out that even the idea of “compensated emancipation” still validates the idea of people as property. In fairness to The Independents, though, the full clip shows that the discussion also ranged to Lincoln’s civil liberties record, and atrocities committed by some in the Union army, which history ignores “because of the demonizing of the South, and it’s not even clear that slavery was the reason for secession, but largely the impetus for secession was tariffs that were being collected at Southern ports, and spent by Northern politicians.” Kennedy then wound things up by observing that Lincoln has defenders “who say that if you are so opposed to Abraham Lincoln, that, in itself, racist.” “Yes, people say that,” Napolitano replied, adding “I of course reject that. You have to be able to discuss every president with equanimity, without being tarred with a brush that won’t come off.”