Only two senators voted against the bill that secured permanent support for the Victims Compensation Fund that benefits 9/11 first responders, one of whom was Utah’s Mike Lee, who committed his own terrorist attack on wordplay this past weekend.
Outside of his work on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart is perhaps best known for being the public face and enraged voice of the movement to secure adequate medical treatment for the first responders who sprung into action on September 11, 2001 when our country came under attack. Despite how the Republican Party paraded around the brave men and women who made unthinkable sacrifices to save lives whenever they needed to drum up enthusiasm for another foreign war, those same conservatives bristled when faced with the bill for the medical care that firefighters, paramedics and police officers who entered Ground Zero would need for the rest of their lives.
In 2019, after 18 years and multiple public reamings from Stewart, the Senate finally promised permanent support for the brave men and women whose medical problems due to the conditions at Ground Zero had already claimed the lives of many of their comrades by the time the ink was dry on the funding bill. But before the 9/11 first responders could celebrate their long overdue legislative victory, they had to suffer through one of the most bizarre, poor-taste lines of questioning ever from Senator Lee, who, on Saturday, reared his ugly head to gloat about the murder of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband.
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But the real crime, as Stewart explained on tonight’s Daily Show, was Lee’s pure hackery when it comes to puns.
“Just a little backstory, I’ve met Senator Lee,” Stewart introduced Lee when addressing the Minnesota murders that sparked ghoulish and celebratory responses from Republican leaders, sarcastically adding, “He’s the best. In 2019, when we were trying to get permanent reauthorization for the Ray Pfeifer, Luis Alvarez and Zadroga Act, we met with Senator Mike Lee in his office down in Washington.”
Stewart had with him a team of first responders for the sit-down with Lee, and “one of the cops had been in the first tower when it collapsed, right? So, all of these first responders are going around the table and they are sharing their stories to try and get Senator Mike Lee to support this bill that is gonna provide life-saving coverage and money to the victims of this terrible terrorist attack and the illnesses they are suffering since then.”
“When the one cop says his story about being in the tower that collapsed and the aftermath, when he told Senator Lee about that experience, Senator Lee smiled, and said, ‘Hah! I bet you’ve got a lot of stories!’” Stewart recalled. “We met a lot of people in Washington. Some were hopeful meetings, some were upsetting meetings. That was the only meeting where we all walked out and looked at each other and went, ‘What the fuck is wrong with that guy?’”
Then, naturally, Lee fought against the measure, one of only two cowards to do so — the other being the predictably vile Rand Paul.
The Daily Show then played a supercut of Lee declaring the deadly importance of mass deportations so that they can prevent migrants from ever committing any more murders on U.S. soil before cutting to Lee’s tweet from this weekend, just hours after the shootings in Minnesota, in which he posted a picture of the murderer with the caption, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.”
Then, the real monstrosity — to prove that his depravity “can go deeper,” Lee then went after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz with the weak-ass pun, “Nightmare on Walz Street.”
“Okay, first of all, Elm Street to Walz Street is a shitty pun,” Stewart remarked of his old pal Lee. “As a comedian, I must object. You’ve got Wolf of Walz Street just sitting there!”
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