WATCH: Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly spar over the Obama scandals

Stewart and his best frenemy talk the IRS, Obama's crackdown on a Fox News reporter, and racial profiling

Stewart and O'Reilly face off
(Image credit: Daily Show)

On Wednesday night, The Daily Show played host to one of the occasional sparring matches between Jon Stewart and his Fox News frenemy, Bill O'Reilly. This go-around, Stewart and O'Reilly agreed that the Justice Department over-reached in its "troubling" investigation of Fox News reporter James Rosen, and that the IRS targeting of some conservative tax-exempt applicants is a big, bad deal. (You can watch extended versions of the O'Reilly interview below.)

Stewart asked O'Reilly: After five years of Fox News being "always on DEFCON 1, red alert" over Obama, how does it feel to "finally have a few things that really look worth investigating?" Are people at Fox experiencing "joy? Is it sexual arousal?" Stewart asked.

Stewart and O'Reilly found some juicy ground for disagreement, of course. On the IRS scandal, O'Reilly said that his "educated speculation" is that Obama used the IRS to intimidate Tea Partiers after their success in the 2010 midterm elections, and Stewart asked him if his theory has made him change his mind about racial and religious profiling. You can see where this is going.

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Earlier in the program, Stewart added one more person to his short list of people who have no right to criticize Obama over the controversies swirling around his administration. Watch:

Here's Part 1 of the extended O'Reilly interview:

And Part 2 (this segment contains a bit of NSFW language at the end):

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.