Stewart: Democrats hypocritical on ‘Fast and Furious’ executive privilege

• Tweet
• 
• 

• Tweet

Thursday night on “The Daily Show,” host Jon Stewart discussed President Barack Obama’s decision to invoke executive privilege to protect documents from the “Fast and Furious” operation from scrutiny by an investigative committee headed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA).

Stewart’s take on “Fast and Furious” is different than most left-leaning pundits’. Stephen Colbert and Rachel Maddow both see the Republican investigation as a right-wing fever dream, a wild-eyed conspiracy theory hatched from the disturbed mind of violent Alabama militiaman Michael Vanderboegh.

Whether or not Stewart is buying into the Republicans’ version of events, he definitely believes that the Democrats have handled the whole thing badly, and that Obama’s decision to invoke executive privilege reeks of the kind of high-handedness and arrogance that Democrats found so galling about the George W. Bush administration. To that end, he rolled an old clip of then-Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) saying that too often when the Bush administration was under pressure, they evoked executive privilege and closed ranks.

“That handsome young high school senior is right,” said Stewart, “but if the current president ignores this man’s advice, the Democrats are now in the position of having to defend an executive action that they thoroughly denouned during the Bush administration not five years prior.”

Which means, he said, that it’s time to play everybody’s favorite game, “Differentiate Your Party’s Assertion of Executive Privilege From the Previous Administration’s.”

He then played video of Democrats like Rep. Carolyn Mahoney (D-NY) and White House spokesman Jay Carney justifying the president’s decision, juxtaposing them against old footage of Republicans offering the same justifications in favor of President George W. Bush.

Soon enough, said Stewart, Republicans will play a round of the “spin-off game,” “Reconcile Your Current Outrage at the Obama Administration’s Use of Executive Privilege with Your Former Apologia for Bush’s Use of Same.”

Watch the clip, embedded via Comedy Central, below: