The Daily Show's Jon Stewart opened his segment on this week's Israeli elections with some footage of the talking heads over at Faux "news" celebrating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's victory and asking when President Obama was going to call and congratulate him (ignoring of course that he already had plans to do just that).
STEWART: Yes, last night Benjamin Netanyahu apparently defeated Barack Obama and the Palestinians. Finally Republicans found a conservative that can defeat Obama, but you know, Obama, hours later still hasn't conceeded. [...]
Really? You find it interesting... you find it interesting that a foreign country’s prime minister who came to Congress against the White House’s wishes and shits on a nuclear deal the president spent years working on, wouldn’t receive an immediate post-election atta boy!
After wondering whether or not President Obama may have been in shock since a lot of people didn't think Bibi was going to pull this one off, Stewart asked how he managed to sway the voters. Sadly as we all know, he won by going all the way to the far right, which Stewart described as "full settler" and by fearmongering over Arabs voting to which Stewart responded.
STEWART: How dare you! How dare you gin up racist fears of minority turnout for short-term political gain. That’s our thing. You know what, now you've got a copyright infringement suit on your hands pal!
Jon wrapped things up by wondering how it might have turned out for Mitt Romney if he'd done the same thing:
Stewart showed footage of Netanyahu claiming that political opponents were importing “huge amounts of Arabs” to inflate the numbers against his Likud party, only to say — after his victory was assured — that every voter, “Jew and non-Jew alike,” was important to him.
The lesson for Republicans, Stewart said, should be “go id or go home.” Had Mitt Romney embraced his “47 percent” speech in 2012, he argued, he might well have won the presidency.
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