Stephen Colbert already took his shot at explaining the fiscal cliff. Now, with talks in Washington heating up — or melting down — Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” offered up its own takedown of the two sides’ inability to work together to solve the “self-imposed fiscal friendly fire,” complete with cliff-diving montage and another new name for the crisis: “Cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust - Totally Solvable Budget Problem.”
“See, here’s what happened,” Stewart said. “Two summers ago Congress realized that if they couldn’t compromise on a deficit and revenue plan, our economy would crash. Well, turns out, they couldn’t compromise. So here’s what they did: In order to force themselves to work together and compromise, they concocted a catastrophic penalty that would itself crash our economy. Let me put it another way. There’s an asteroid headed towards the Earth. We made it and fired it at ourselves, because otherwise we would never have done the hard work required to protect ourselves from asteroids.”
Stewart then turned to the media, mocking the various terms used to make the cliff seem less ominous — from a hill to an “austerity sloping crisis of some kind” to, awkwardly, a garden. "Our country faces a fiscal disaster, and we don’t have to compromise or fix it, because we can just sit back in our garden and enjoy the fruits and flowery aromas of Washington in December," Stewart said. “F--- us.”
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