On Wednesday night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart put 16 years of watching Fox News to use, methodically (and using Vine) laying out his indictment of the political right's "chronically angry war for ideological purity." Most of Stewart's segments have a news hook — this one was his own retirement, and how conservative pundits and personalities have used it to dismiss The Daily Show as a bunch of dishonestly edited snippets of their shows, juxtaposed to make conservatives look bad.
After challenging Fox News to a "lie-off" (in his voice usually reserved for Sen. Lindsey Graham), Stewart essentially outlined his thesis about the conservative media universe. They don't care about whether or not he's lying, Stewart said. "What matters to the right is discrediting anything that harms their side. That's their prime directive, and unlike Capt. Kirk, they f--ing stick with the prime directive." It infects everything Fox News does, he added. Conservatives aren't trying to fix America, "the country they purport to love," they're trying to make education, voting rights, science, and government "reinforce their partisan conservative ideological viewpoint." And it's working: Institutions continually cave to the right, Stewart said, but they should stop: You can never "sate the beast." Case, rested. So where does Stewart go from here? —Peter Weber
The Week
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