Watch The Daily Show call BS on Fox News' new talking point

(Image credit: Comedy Central)

last updated 8 January 2015

Jon Stewart started out Thursday night's Daily Show with a look at the Congressional Budget Office's new report on the outlook for the federal budget — well, since that's too boring, he focused on the misinformation from Fox News and conservative commentators over what the CBO report said about the economic effects of ObamaCare.

Stewart began with a series of clips in which Fox personalities laid out some pretty dire claims from the report: ObamaCare will cost 2.5 million jobs, add trillions of dollars to the deficit, and shift workers to part-time jobs. "There was only one small problem with the apocalyptic predictions from the CBO," he said, "and that is that the report did not in any way say any of those things." In fact, quite the opposite, as the CBO chief told Congress.

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Give Stewart credit for this: He turned the well-trodden argument over what the CBO report said about ObamaCare into a disquisition on how Republicans and Fox News pundits view the family. One of the Fox crowd's knocks against ObamaCare making people more flexible in their employment choices is that those workers will chose to spend more time with their families, according to the tightly edited clips Stewart played.

But the family-values two-step doesn't end there. Stewart backed up to Christmas and Thanksgiving, rolling out a greatest hits of Fox personalities arguing that retailers should stay open Thanksgiving and Christmas, families be damned, because it will help boost the economy — or, because capitalism. "Somehow, 'I think people should spend Thanksgiving with the family' turns into 'well, I guess — if you're a communist,'" Stewart said. (Watch above)

After dissecting one fairly weighty controversy, Stewart turned to a sillier one: the Coke commercial that debuted during the Super Bowl. People were upset that the ad featured immigrant kids singing "America the Beautiful" in their native languages. First, Stewart couldn't believe that people were upset over the sappy Coke ad but not the one where the horse and dog fall in love, or the "Greek yogurt sex game" one, or the pistachio ad where Stephen Colbert's head is cracked open.

Next, Stewart got down to the meat of the controversy: The least silly complaint about the ad is that immigrants should assimilate into U.S. culture quicker. "They’re singing 'America the Beautiful' while drinking Coca-Cola," Stewart noted, incredulously. "How much more American assimilation can they have?" He then noted that most of the "self-appointed patriots" complaining about the ad had ancestors who came to the U.S. and held onto their native language longer than the xenophobes of their day were comfortable with. Stewart ended the segment with a look at what a similar ad might have looked like in 1928. Everyone's not exactly in tune, but it's an interesting reminder as we debate immigration reform. Watch:

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.