It's easy to tell that President Obama is going through a scandal-ridden “tough time” since he's even under fire from Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” on the Comedy Central cable channel, who said on Tuesday that the Democratic occupant of the White House “can't keep saying you found out about news at the same time as us!”
The liberal comedian said he found it strange that the president didn't learn much sooner about the Internal Revenue Service persecuting groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names and the Justice Department confiscating phone records about Associated Press reporters.
Stewart's first salvo dealt with the fact that during his press conference on Monday with David Cameron, prime minister of the United Kingdom, Obama restricted questions from the press to a “limit of one, total, from the entire American press corps” in attendance.
However, Julie Pace, White House correspondent for the Associated Press, dodged that restriction by combining four queries into one long question.
Along with the situation in Benghazi, Libya, and who came up with the talking points on that attack, Pace turned her attention to the scandal involving the IRS and when he learned about it.
Obama began his reply by discussing the problems regarding the IRS.
I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this. I think it was on Friday. And this is pretty straightforward.
Stewart mocked the mild manner Obama used in answering the question and pointed out that this is not the first time Obama has claimed to learn about news at the same time as everyone else.
The liberal host pointed out that Obama said the same thing about the Fast and Furious ATF gun-running scandal and when a low-flying plane "freaked out" everyone in New York City.
"I wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama learned Osama bin Laden had been killed when he saw himself announce it on television,” Stewart joked.
Another topic under discussion is the discrepancy between Obama's claim that he learned about the trouble with the IRS last Friday, but in a news conference on Tuesday, press secretary Jay Carney stated that the White House was notified about the tax agency's problem “several weeks ago.”
In addition, Carney said that first a report had to be compiled by the IRS’s inspector general and then, when it was completed, it was passed on to the administration.
“A notification is appropriate and routine, and that is what happened, and that happened several weeks ago,” Carney said, though he claimed that neither he nor the president were notified individually.
However, Tuesday night's program wasn't the first time this week that Stewart hammered President Obama and his administration.
On Monday evening, the host slammed the government for having a lack of “managerial competence” regarding the burgeoning IRS scandal.
During that weeknight program, the comedian slammed Lois Lerner, the IRS staffer in charge of nonprofit designations, who stated that employees in the service's Cincinnati office singled out the conservative terms not out of political bias, but as a “shortcut” while processing applications for groups seeking non-taxable status.
Stewart then criticized Lerner for thinking that “an apology was good enough for an IRS-related matter.” She also admitted that she's not good at math, which also drew fire from the liberal host: “That’s a good one, a lady who works at the place that calculates people’s taxes!”
He stated that the scandals involving different divisions of the Obama administration have changed the dynamic between the government and citizens who hold extreme opinions.
“Well, congratulations, President Barack Obama,” Stewart said, stating that the scandals have now “shifted the burden of proof from the tinfoil-behatted to the government.”
Conspiracy theorists who generally can survive in anaerobic environments have just had an algae bloom dropped on their f***ing heads, thus removing the last arrow in your pro-governance quiver: skepticism about your opponents.
While it may seem that Stewart is no longer a fan of the president, less than one week ago, he and his fellow Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert were downplaying the response to the Benghazi incident and instead attacking the president's critics.
In addition, Obama has been a guest several times on “The Daily Show.” He could likely return at a future date and be served softball questions from the host, but in the short term, even Stewart can't ignore or downplay the mess the president's in.
I'm reminded of something my father once said: "If you're going to be a liar, you better have a great memory." It seems that Obama and his fellow liberal Democrats need more memory if they intend to maintain power through the president's second term.
