Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart took Fox Noise host Stuart Varney to the woodshed for having the nerve to complain about President Obama’s observation that his network constantly denigrates and puts down the nation’s poor.
Obama remarked on Fox’s frequent denunciations of low-income Americans during the middle of a discussion on poverty Georgetown University earlier this week; this extended transcript highlights the remark that caught the attention of the blundering propaganda artists at Fox:
[T]here’s always been a strain in American politics where you’ve got the middle class, and the question has been, who are you mad at, if you’re struggling; if you’re working, but you don’t seem to be getting ahead. And over the last forty years, sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top, or to be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leaches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction.
And, look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu — they will find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them. (Laughter.) They’re like, I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obama phone — (laughter) — or whatever.
And that becomes an entire narrative — right? — that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress — which is much more typical — who’s raising a couple of kids and is doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills.
Fox’s Stuart Varney, who hosts a program on its business channel, subsequently whined to a fellow Fox anchor that President Obama was unfairly “blaming us, the honest messengers” for his own “policy failures”.
The Daily Show took notice of this outrageous lack of self-awareness, and also dug up another clip of Varney denouncing nutrition assistance whilst simultaneously trying to claim he wasn’t saying anything about the people who use nutrition assistance to put food on their tables. In reply, host Jon Stewart presented a series of montages capturing times when Fox personalities openly and freely expressed their disdain for working people – including a series of clips of Varney sneering that poor people can’t be that badly off, since most own refrigerators and microwaves!