Tag: Rant of the Week

There are no jokes, just Jon doing what he does like no one else in the midst of a tragedy.

“I didn’t do my job today. I apologize,” Stewart said, after explaining how his primary daily duty is to mock the daily news. “I’ve got nothing for you in terms of jokes and sounds, because of what happened in South Carolina. Maybe if I wasn’t nearing the end of the run or this wasn’t such a common occurrence, maybe I could have pulled out of the spiral. But I didn’t. And so I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence we do to each other and the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal but we pretend doesn’t exist.

“I’m confident though that by acknowledging it – by staring into that and seeing it for what it is – we still won’t do jacksh-t,” Stewart continued. “Yeah. That’s us. That’s the part that blows my mind. I don’t want to get into the political argument […] what blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves.” […]

“We invaded two countries and spent trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over five or six different countries, all to keep Americans safe. ‘We gotta do whatever we can – we’ll torture people. We gotta do whatever we can to keep Americans safe,'” Stewart said. “Nine people. Shot in a church. What are you going to do about that? ‘Hey, what are you going to do. Crazy is crazy is, right?’ That’s the part I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around. And you know it. You know it’s going to go down the same path.”

Stewart pointed out how the media has already shied away from calling the murders a “terrorist attack.”

“I heard someone on the news say, ‘Tragedy has visited the church.’ This wasn’t a tornado. This was racist,” Stewart said. “I hate to use the pun, but this one was black and white. There’s no nuance here. But we’re going to keep pretending. We are steeped in that culture in this country and we refuse to recognize it.” […]

“Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them who wanted to start some kind of civil war,” Stewart said, before laying into South Carolina for still having the Confederate flag flying over its state capitol.

“The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina. And the roads are named for Confederate generals. And the white guy is the one who feels like his country is being taken away from him. We’re bringing it on ourselves,” Stewart said. “Al Qaeda, all those guys – ISIS. They’re not sh-t compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis.”

Last year, John Oliver, the host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” gave a scathing and hilarious report on the corrupt world of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, a.k.a. FIFA. John now gives us another of his gleeful soliloquies on the current arrests of fourteen FIFA officials, recapping some of pathetic defenses and the farcical re-election of Sepp Blatter for a fifth term as president.

After explaining the players in the fraud (including FIFA snitch Chuck Blazer, a man who looks like “Bad Santa”, Mr. Jack “Not the Onion” Warner, and Evil FIFA President Sepp Blatter), Oliver listed the extent of FIFA’s corruption and cruelty. Blatter, for instance, is the kind of guy who would make women play World Cup soccer on Astroturf, which bangs up people’s legs something awful: “The last time an athlete’s legs were beaten up that badly in advance of an major competition was when Tonya Harding was unwilling to settle for silver.” But Blatter may be best known for inexplicably granting the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, which has seen nearly 1,200 people die during the construction of its stadium.

Oliver was hardly surprised that Blatter subsequently won re-election, one day after the massive wave of arrests, due to the weird profit-sharing system of FIFA, in which every country gets the same amount of money regardless of their population. With that, he cheered on America and begged them to arrest Blatter, because that would do more for the American image abroad than anything else. “Imagine if the Dutch suddenly found a reason to extradite Donald Trump,” he explained.

“The problem is all the arrests in the world are going to change nothing if Blatter’s still there, because to truly kill a snake you must cut off its head-or in this case, its asshole,” the HBO host said.

He pleads for advertisers to withdraw their support for FIFA until the governing body comes to its senses and axes Blatter.

I would like to make a plea to them tonight: Please make Sepp Blatter go away. I will do anything. Adidas, I will wear one of your ugly shoes. One of these shoes that make me look like the Greek god of aspiring DJs. McDonalds, I will take a bite out of every item on your Dollar Menu-which tastes like normal food that was cursed by a vindictive wizard. And I will even make the ultimate sacrifice: Budweiser, if you pull your support and help get rid of Blatter, I will put my mouth where my mouth is, and I will personally drink one of your disgusting items. I’m serious. It could be a Bud-Lite. I will even drink a Bud-Lite Lime, despite the fact that all the lime in the world cannot disguise the fact that this tastes like a puddle beneath a Long John Silver’s dumpster. But I will do it. I will drink one maintaining eye contact with the camera and say it’s delicious, because if you get rid of the Swiss demon who has ruined the sport I love, this stuff will taste like fucking Champagne!”

Jon has made up his mind that he’s leaving. But the temptation to change his mind if Donald Trump throws his hat in the ring just might make him change his mind.