Best of the Week: The Daily Show on Trayvon Martin and more…

MONDAY (March 26, 2012)

Jon Stewart joked about how Dick Cheney’s heart transplant would be covered in the organ community.

Innocent Heart Sentenced to Life in Cheney

Stewart opposed the jokes about Cheney while trying to figure out how to cover the horror of the Trayvon Martin case. Turning to that subject, Wyatt Cynac explains that…

The shelf life on non-threatening black people garb is pretty short. I’m wearing this on TV right now so that means we’re just forty-eight hours away from “Hello, police, there’s a black guy with scary head blades and some large swirly hypnotism disk. I think he’s here to steal my granddaughter.”

TUESDAY (March 27, 2012)

So Rick Santorum swore at a New York Times reporter. Now, I don’t have a problem with public officials swearing. I don’t have a problem with politicians being upset with reporters. I do have a problem with politicians who run on the holier-than-thou ticket swearing and pretending that it’s somehow holy when they do it, but everyone else better be on more churchlike behavior.

STEWART: Rick Santorum, social conservative, swearing at a reporter — I think this is how he should talk from now on. “I believe that life begins at f#$king conception. You got a problem with that, a$$hole?”

Wednesday (March 28, 2012)

STEWART: How is it that one of our most popular foods has been filled with ammonia-spritzed pink slime and we just found out about it? Let me guess. The beef industry doesn’t call it pink slime.

FOX NEWS: The official term is “lean finely textured beef.”

I actually found the The Daily Show bit on pink slime to be one of their weaker segments. The humor would have been sharper had it focused on the structural answers to that question, which go beyond the labeling, to facts such as the weakness of the FDA.

Thursday (March 29, 2012)

First, the health care fight at the Supreme Court.

STEWART: So now we the two sides, have drawn the battle lines, it’s “I believe preexisting conditions should not disqualify people from insurance coverage” versus “I believe in freedom.”

Stewart translates Justice Antonin Scalia’s attitude towards people without health insurance.

Have you tried, I don’t know, f*ck ‘em?

Second, have you heard of Rachel Maddow? After visiting David Letterman on Monday and Howard Stern on Wednesday, she says hello to Jon Stewart on Thursday. (Could someone let me know who she visited on Tuesday?) Rachel’s got a new book called Drift.

MADDOW: We didn’t feel like we went to war as a country. We felt like we’re a country that sent the military to war and the military fought the wars and we weren’t invested in them and we didn’t sacrifice for it and we didn’t feel it. And we still feel that way and I think we ought to feel that way. It ought to make us want to change the way we are as a country and I don’t think it would be impossible to do.

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