Jon Stewart started out Monday night's Daily Show with a look at what progress the Obama administration is making on fixing HealthCare.gov, the ObamaCare online insurance marketplace. There have been some cosmetic changes, Stewart noted — with a macabre, Halloween-ready homepage mockup at the ready — but even President Obama says the site won't be fixed until the end of November.
After casually debuting a pretty good Obama impersonation, Stewart said he thinks he knows at least one problem plaguing HealthCare.gov: "Their servers are currently being overloaded by newscasters from every single network." This allowed Stewart to amusingly merge two of his favorite targets: ObamaCare and CNN.
But the only thing worse, Stewart said, than the White House's handling of the situation and CNN's coverage of it is that Congress is now getting involved. And the committee that's holding hearings is chaired by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who wanted the U.S. to apologize to BP for BP's oil spill, and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), a man who was first elected to his seat two years before the invention of the semiconductor.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
The highlights of this segment are the back-and-forth between Barton and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) — "this is not a monkey court!" Barton insists in a hearing — and Stewart's impassioned version of "Try a Little Tenderness," inspired by the Democrats' evidently poll-tested ObamaCare exhortation to "fix it, don't nix it."
In the middle part of the show, Stewart scolded Obama for apparently not knowing about ObamaCare's glitches until after the site launched. You'd think Obama would be in the loop about a program that's named after him, he added. "But in his defense, there appear to be very few loops he is in." This led Stewart to question why Obama didn't know that the NSA was spying on allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The answer: That the NSA apparently takes orders not from the president but from the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, the name of which sent Stewart down a rabbit hole of mostly joking conspiracy theories. Luckily, it also led to a report from correspondent Jessica Williams. Watch:
