Jon Stewart started out Monday night's Daily Show reminding everyone just how badly things are going for President Obama. His foreign allies are mad that the U.S. is spying on them, and his domestic allies are upset over the botched rollout of ObamaCare and its online marketplace, Healthcare.gov. Obama is even being booed at basketball games — an insult compounded by the cheering in Toronto for crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford.
"It is hard to overstate what a low point this is in Barack Obama's presidency," Stewart said. Hard, "but not impossible." And the biggest way Obama's trouble are being overstated is calling the rollout of Healthcare.gov "Obama's Katrina."
This is in no way an attempt to polish up Obama's website snafu, Stewart said, but comparing "the government abdication during Hurricane Katrina" — plus the loss of hundreds of lives and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people — to a glitchy website "is offensive."
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The Week's Jon Terbush walked through some major problems with the ObamaCare-Katrina analogy. But the people taking the most umbrage, Stewart sighed, seem to be Bush administration officials who were in charge during Hurricane Katrina and the pundits at Fox News. Stewart then gave his own critique of the Katrina comparison: "Are you out of your f—king mind?"
To answer that question, and suggest better analogies for Obama's woes, Stewart brought out his "Best F#@king News Panel" — Jason Jones, Samantha Bee, and Al Madrigal. They talked less about Obama's troubles than all the big scandals of the Bush years — and some long-forgotton ones. Stewart got his share of insults from the panel, too:
In the middle section of The Daily Show, Stewart discussed the recent developments in gay rights, in a segment he subtly called Gaywatch. He first tackled the family feud between Dick Cheney daughters Liz Cheney — who's running for Senate in Wyoming as an opponent of gay marriage — and Mary Cheney, who is married to a woman. Then, he dissected Hallmark's expunging of the word "gay" from "Deck the Halls," and Hawaii's legalization of gay marriage.
If one of those things doesn't sound like the others, Stewart touted the Hawaii news as the good news in the bunch. Before he closed the segment, he sang an odd Christmas carol in falsetto, introduced his audience to a gay-sex slang "eating milk and cookies," and continued his war on non–New York style pizza, gratuitously insulting Hawaii's ham and pineapple pies. Watch:
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