As you may have heard, a scary black man, a rapper, named Common read some poetry at the White House last night, and somehow, luckily, no one managed to get shot and none of the White House silverware was stolen — as far as we know. This country’s greatest moral crusaders, most of them employed by Fox News, tried to warn us about the dire consequences of such a thing happening, and we are fortunate that the very foundation of this great nation did not crumble to the ground for not having listened to them.
Yeah, whatever.
On the Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart expressed many of the same thoughts and feelings I’ve felt over this exceedingly stupid “controversy” over the last few days. It’s so old and tired and sad and utterly predictable. When Sarah Palin weighed in with her “outrage” on Twitter the other day I wrote:
When word got out that the Michelle Obama had invited rapper Common to a White House event celebrating American poetry on Wednesday, you just knew that the conservative noise machine would latch onto it like flies to a fresh mound of horsesh*t. Because that’s what they do — lay in wait like snakes in the grass looking to strike at some bit of slow-moving prey that they can then use to tap into the prejudices, fears and insecurities of their base of simpletons.
In Stewart’s exacerbated words last night, “Are we really doing this again?…The guy from the Gap ads…That’s who you’re gonna do this for? That’s your misogynist, cop-icidal black supremacist?”
He then proceeded to do what the Daily Show does so well — surgically break down the dumb narrative using wit and archive footage to expose the hypocrisy and mundacity inherent in their arguments. Long live the Daily Show.
Here’s the first part…
https://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:video:thedailyshow.com:386067
And the second…
https://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:video:thedailyshow.com:386068
And here’s Common doing his thing last night. As DCeiver noted, “I imagine the streets now run red with the blood of police officers.”