What more can be said about Sarah Palin's widely criticized comments that as president she would use waterboarding to "baptize terrorists"? Jon Stewart took a stab on Tuesday night's Daily Show, asking: "Where is that speech appropriate? At an al-Qaeda recruitment how-to workshop?" The answer, of course, is that Palin was speaking to the National Rifle Association's annual meeting. After a brief detour into Greek mythology, Stewart spent the next six minutes pointing out the NRA's victim complexes and mission creep.
"At some point the perfectly acceptable support for sane gun ownership got mixed up in the whole national culture war mess," Stewart said. The answer to everything NRA leaders (read: conservatives) don't like is: "that's why you need a gun," he added. When Sen. Marco Rubio (R) said at the NRA conference that "they like to paint us as paranoid, bitter people," Stewart disagreed, quipping that "we asked you to paint us a self-portrait," and the result was Munch's "The Scream." He went on to point out that the NRA is getting all sorts of gun laws passed, setting up his best line of the night, about Georgia's new "guns everywhere" law. --Peter Weber
The Week
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