On Tuesday night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart focused on Republican opposition to food stamps. The stated reason for opposing aid to the hungry is food stamp fraud, Stewart noted, before indulging in a little bit of light debunking. But amid all the tall tales of people using their food stamps to gamble and buy gym memberships, he noticed a strange obsession on Fox News with indignantly judging what kinds of actual food people are buying with food stamps.
The conservative annoyance over food stamps being used on junk food? Stewart said he could understand that: Maybe low-income people should be using taxpayer financed aid to eat healthy — like seafood. "People say, 'eat more fish," he said. "Why can't you spend it on that?" Nope. Roll tape of Fox pundits criticizing food stamp purchases of fresh fish and organic produce. Alright, Stewart asked conservatives, "what's the right mixture of quality and class-based shame poor people should aim for in their meal planning?"
It's not clear. But finally, Stewart walked us through to Fox personalities falling back on the old saying about teaching a man to fish. Ah, he said: Conservatives don't mind poor people eating seafood as long as they caught it themselves. Nope again. "For some f--king weird reason," he concluded, conservatives "really do not want lower-income individuals eating any seafood." It seem implausible, but hey, who's going to argue with a string of carefully selected Fox News clips? --Peter Weber
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