Jon Stewart Bids Farewell to Fox News: ‘Adios, Motherf—ers’
Jon Stewart began his final week as host of The Daily Show doing what he does best: Squaring off once more against his Moriarty, his Vader, his Hans Gruber: the fair and balanced folks at Fox News.
Still feeding off last week’s news about Stewart’s not-so-secret meetings with Barack Obama, Howard Kurtz and others at Fox continued to harp on the Daily Show host for serving as an unofficial mouthpiece for the administration. But their evidence, outside of Stewart and Obama’s generally similar political ideologies, wasn’t exactly full proof — still, Stewart was happy to offer the network a few tips he’s learned over the years on how to properly expose a hypocrite.
“You’d like to nail me as a propagandist, you could’ve just shown a clip of me shamelessly pimping for some signature policy, like Obamacare,” Stewart said. He then played a clip of his interview with former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, where he tried to download every movie ever before she bought healthcare on the malfunctioning marketplace.
While Stewart admitted that wasn’t the best example, he instructed Fox to find examples of him sucking up to the president. Instead, he ran a montage of incredulous Fox hosts talking about his own criticisms of the administration.
Still not the evidence the network deserved, Stewart suggested finding a memo where he offered Obama advice on his area of expertise: communications. A note, for example, similar to the one Fox News President Roger Ailes sent George W. Bush about presenting the war on terror to the American public.
“I wrongly believe that I am helping Howard Kurtz with his case against me, and yet I apparently seem to be doing the opposite,” Stewart apologized with a smarmy smile.
Back on track, Stewart settled on a surefire way to prove his own collusion with the Obama administration: Find proof he was using the language of the Democratic party to properly frame, not clarify, a specific issue. Like, say, Fox News’ Washington managing editor, Bill Sammons, telling his team not to call Obamacare the “public option,” but rather the GOP-approved “government option.”
“I’m just playing around with you guys,” Stewart chided. “Your hypocrisy isn’t a bug in the Fox model. It’s the feature. Your job is to discredit any source of criticism that might hurt the conservative brand by angrily holding them to standards you yourselves jettisoned in your news network’s mission statement… My hunch is this show’s been harder on the Obama administration and this president, per capita, then you ever were in eight years of Bush finger-banging.”
With that, Stewart bid Fox a fond, fiery “Adios, motherfuckers!” He lit up the studio with a faux hand grenade — only to be told he still has three more shows left.