After the last week or two of being ready to break my television set after hearing one too many of these talking heads on the television compare the botched rollout of the healthcare.gov web site to Hurricane Katrian, it was nice to see them get the treatment they deserved during the opening to this Monday's The Daily Show.
While Jon Stewart went to town on Monday on media outlets for parroting Republicans and comparing the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) troubled implementation to Hurricane Katrina, he stopped for a second to address Fox News Chris Wallace for saying Katrina “ended within a week,” while the new law could affect people “for years to come.”
“Are you out of your –” Stewart began to say, before stopping once he heard his audience’s collected grown. “Do you know you’ve disappointed our audience? They think you might be out of your f*cking mind.” [...]
While he had no intentions of polishing the “.turd” that was the government health care exchange website healthcare.gov, Stewart said, he also mocked Republicans for being offended by the comparison, and pointed out that Gov. Bobby Jindal’s refused to allow his state to take part in one of the new health care exchanges offered as part of the ACA while accusing the White House of “bullying” Louisiana.
“Bullying?” Stewart asked incredulously. “The feds were gonna pay for the Medicaid expansion. How was that bullying? ‘Hey, four-eyes, you need to see an opthamologist, we can cover that. How is that bullying?’”
Stewart wrapped things up with a panel of Daily Show correspondents, who went through the list of other George W. Bush screw ups and national embarrassments they could have compared the Obamacare rollout to instead. I was glad to see David Gregory's ridiculous Iraq analogy get the treatment it deserved.
