Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) may be comparing ObamaCare to Green Eggs and Ham, and his repeal effort to The Little Engine That Could, but The Daily Show's Jon Stewart has another analogy: Springtime for Hitler, the accidental hit musical from Mel Brooks' The Producers.
House Republicans and a small group of GOP senators, led by Cruz, are insisting that Democrats deep-six their big health-care overhaul to keep the government running after September 30. Most Republicans are on record disliking ObamaCare to varying degrees — "It sucks," says Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is facing a likely primary challenge next year from his right flank — but they disagree over whether it's too late to sink it. A key provision kicks in October 1.
Stewart said he has his own problems with the Affordable Care Act — namely, it doesn't go far enough — but extending health insurance to 25 million people "is better than not that." Republicans not only think the law "sucks," Stewart added, but are convinced that it won't work. And they're doing everything in their power to make sure it doesn't — including running creepy ads with a leering Uncle Sam puppet preparing to examine a patient — or, perhaps, sexually assault him.
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"Let me get this straight," Stewart said. "They're using the same tactic to scare us that Burger King uses to try and make us like them."
This effort to defund ObamaCare, misinform people about it, and "appeal to fear of anal puppet finger-banging" is probably doomed to fail, Stewart said, so now they're threatening to shut down the government. But their real fear isn't that ObamaCare will kill jobs, Stewart argued — after all, a government shutdown will do that quite nicely — it's that people will like the new entitlement. Cruz has made that exact point, in his own way.
But this "sugar" Cruz warns that Americans will get "addicted" to, Stewart said, is health insurance — "something that can literally battle the effects of too much sugar." He distilled the argument of Cruz and his allies down to this colorful simile: ObamaCare is "like crack to us — you give us one small taste of Social Security, and suddenly we're all sucking the glass d**k of not having our old people freeze to death and live off cat food."
In the third segment, correspondent Jessica Williams does a game job of using humor to highlight one of those important-but-boring stories, about an Obama administration proposal to replace some foreign food aid with cash. That would feed more starving Africans, she notes, but there will be victims, too. Watch:
