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Video: The Daily Show Catches Fox's Religious Conversion (Over Terrorism)

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Sometimes a Daily Show comedy segment involves an elaborate, reported-in-the-field setup. Sometimes it’s a lengthy, constructed satirical riff. And sometimes it just involves finding somebody doing something colossally hypocritical, collecting a whole lot of videotape, and letting it roll while you sit back and eat an entire turkey.

That’s what Jon Stewart and company did last night. In a nutshell: since the mass murder in Norway by a Christian right-wing extremist, various commentators on Fox News have been outraged that anyone would use this horrible incident to make the killer representative of all Christianity.

An entirely reasonable point. Now imagine replacing the words “Christian” and “Christianity” with “Muslim” and “Islam” but keeping the name “Fox News.” You can’t, of course; and the rest is simply assembling the footage that shows the Foxitariat desperately scrambling to make an argument 180 degrees opposed to the one that its last decade of broadcasting has been premised on.

There’s another implicit punchline to this joke, by the way: will this blatant hypocrisy lose Fox any credibility in the eyes of its viewers? Will it cause Fox to change its treatment of Islam and terrorism one bit in the future? The smart money is on no and no. Because that’s the thing about a brazenly one-sided argument pitched at an audience of partisan believers: it’s pretty much ridicule-proof. An audience that doesn’t want to see the contradictions won’t see them; there will always be a reason to believe that It’s Different for Them Than for Us.

And if anyone points out the patent ridiculousness of using the exact same argument to exonerate one religion that you ignore for another religion—well, it’s just proof that they’re out to get you. The liberals, the elites, the left, the smug snarkmeisters who just sit there and mock you! Which meant that The Daily Show’s first video roll was perfectly complemented by its second, in which Fox commentators decry “victimology”–except when the “victims” doing the -ology are the subjects of the “one acceptable prejudice” in America, which, apparently, is against whatever some person on Fox News happens to personally believe in:

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That turkey looked delicious. But I don’t expect to see any of the clip-reel targets publicly eating crow any time soon.