President Joe Biden gave a sweeping pardon of his son Hunter Biden on Sunday, a controversial move that particularly outraged right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly. “F--- you, Joe Biden,” she said on her podcast in reaction to the news.
“Megyn Kelly, who do you think you are, me?” Jon Stewart jokingly responded in his Monday monologue. “What am I supposed to say now? ‘F--- you’ is my line!”
Sure enough, Stewart wasn’t thrilled about Biden’s pardon. Although he noted that “Republicans get away with this s--t all the time,” he noted how Biden’s decision undermined months of Democratic messaging.
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“The problem is the rest of the Democrats made Biden’s pledge to not pardon Hunter the foundation of their defense of America, this ‘grand experiment,’” Stewart said.
Stewart showed a montage of prominent Democrats bragging about Biden’s initial decision to not pardon Hunter, followed by recent clips of them trying to justify the pardon.
“This is what Biden’s decision has done,” Stewart said. “Look how confident and eloquent our Democratic representatives were back when they thought they had the moral high ground on this issue.”
Stewart acknowledged the double standard Democrats often have to deal with, saying, “It’s hard. Democrats have the tougher road of defending our institutions and systems as being flawed but still valuable; Republicans just run on blowing this s--t up.”
The lesson, Stewart argued, was not that Democrats shouldn’t break the norms like Biden just did, but rather that they shouldn’t have put so much stock in their “moral high ground” in the first place.
“Rules, loopholes, and norms,” Stewart said. “The distance between the systems Democrats say they are revering and the one that they’re using when they need to is why people think it’s rigged.”
He advised Democrats, “Use the rules, use the loopholes, f--- the norms, but also use it to help the people, not just those people related to you.”
