Samantha Bee dived right back into this insane election season with an in-depth look at last week's disastrous Commander-in-Chief forum, Matt Lauer, and the dismal state of our Fourth Estate.
"I bet the veterans have some things they'd like to ask a draft dodging, Gold Star family insulting, war crimes advocating torture-phile whose worst Vietnam flashback involves scrambling for the last plane out of Gonorrhea," she mocked.
After skewering Lauer and Trump, she went after the rest of them for their aversion to checking facts, which seems to be an epidemic in this election cycle. And boy howdy, did she find some awesome clips, where journalists challenged their viewers to decide if Trump wants to violate the Geneva conventions.
"You heard her, average American. In your plentiful spare time when you're not working your two jobs or watching your screaming kids, why not spend 20 or 30 hours studying the Geneva Convention so you know whether or not it's okay to steal another country's oil," she mocked.
"There's no time to report the facts and what people feel are the facts," she warned. "You've got to choose one. Guys, we are swimming in bad information. Our dads are on Facebook. Chemtrails are not real, dad."
"Why can't the media just tell us what's true and what's bullsh*t? "
After playing some clips of the self-justification cable talkers give for why they can't possibly serve as fact-checkers -- like Tweety claiming Matt Lauer would be expressing an opinion by bringing up facts, Bee laid it out.
"Calling a liar a liar isn't an opinion if you can prove it. That's what we call a fact. The idea that news network executives traded their balls for ratings, that's just my opinion."
Finally, she went on to the false balance media insists on maintaining. I wondered aloud this morning about whether media was operating on the assumption that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, and so held her to an entirely different standard than Trump. Bee has a different theory, which is the simple argument that they make them equivalent in their minds and then use a lot of excuses for why they do it.
"Maintaining the image of fairness requires them to portray Hillary and Trump as equally flawed candidates, even though they know that's incorrect," she noted. "On the one hand you have the most breathtakingly, unqualified, ignoramus to of heave his balls within striking distance of office. A race-baiting bully who, according to two carefully researched biographies, is a tax cheating, investor swindling, dictator loving, pathologically lying, attorneys general bribing, philandering, mobbed up, narcissistic serial con artist who hasn't got the attention span to read a fortune cookie much less a -- intelligence briefing."
Using the perfect visual for this part, she concluded, "But on the other hand, Hillary Clinton used a private e-mail server. See? Perfectly even. Next up on the place for politics the neck and neck ..."
Now let's put this in front of every single one of those "both sides" journalists out there over and over again. Just the visual is perfect, but the words make it exquisitely perfect.
