The Daily Show is a comedy show and thus should be forgiven all of its sins — which have always been minor. I understand the urge to at least try to provide some level of balance — to not just turn into “that liberal show.” And the sad thing about America is that The Daily Show and Jon Stewart really aren’t liberal. They skew very slightly to the left, but what they really are is more in line with the reform Democrats who showed up in Congress after Watergate. And let’s remember: these were the beginning of the New Democrats — they were not at all about ideology. They just wanted government that was transparent and without corruption. That’s Jon Stewart; that’s The Daily Show.

So it was very much in this context that The Daily Show presented an epic take down of Fox News Wednesday night. Was it liberal bias? No. It wasn’t even political. It was just calling the network on its almost two decades of misinformation. One can be deeply conservative without being dishonest. But Fox News has never been interested in that. I have no doubt whatsoever that if an academic study were done comparing how accurate Pravda was in the Soviet Union during the 1970s, it would do as well or better than Fox News has done over the last decade.

Now that Jon Stewart is retiring, Fox News has used the opportunity to attack The Daily Show for it’s “selective editing.” I’ll admit, there have been a couple of times where The Daily Show played fast and loose with context. And that’s it: a couple of times. If most news sources were as scrupulous as The Daily Show, we would have a far improved media environment. If Fox News were half as scrupulous as The Daily Show, they would not be a national embarrassment.

Megyn Kelly said, “I can speak personally to a lot of the attacks that have been levied on me had no foothold in the facts.” Well, let’s start with the fact that Megyn Kelly is one of the most reasonable parts of the Fox News circus who rarely had attacks levied on her. But what about when last October, she said that a new Colorado law “literally allows residents to print ballots from their home computers, then encourages them to turn ballots over to ‘collectors'”? And remember: she’s one of the sane ones.

You would think after all this time that Fox News would just leave it alone. Why start a fight with Jon Stewart? There are various problems. First, he’s right. Second, he’s funny with a whole lot of funny writers. And third, in the end, he’s a comedian. It is like a big guy beating up a charming skinny guy: the big guy either wins and looks like a total jerk, or the big guy loses and looks both pathetic and like a total jerk. And guess what: the big guy is going to lose. The real “news network” will just look like a pathetic jerk. In fact, it already has.

In the video above, Stewart called out Fox News to a “lie off.” They created a vine of fifty Fox News lies. And PolitiFact has already listed them all out, The Fact-Checks Behind The Daily Show‘s 50 Fox News “Lies.” This is how it comes out: there were only two that PolitiFact hadn’t previously rated. Of the remaining 48, the best Fox News did was a single “Mostly False.” And there were two that Fox News later admitted to — one specifically because The Daily Show caught them on it. Then there were 34 “False” and 11 “Pants on Fire” claims!

This isn’t about politics. This is about a network that is simply an arm of the Republican Party that would say exactly the opposite things about an issue if the party flipped on it tomorrow. It is an outrage. Stewart summed it up, “Even watching it is killing me.” I don’t think that was a joke. And I think he speaks for the entire nation.

In the first half of October 2013, the Republicans shut down the government. The people were very unhappy with the Republicans. Just over one year later, these very same people voted for those same Republicans they were so angry at only a year before by a whopping 5.6 percentage points in the House. I understand. Elections are not about changed opinions. They are about who shows up to vote. But all that means is that many of the people who were angry weren’t angry enough to vote. What’s more, among those people who voted for such Republican winners as Sam Brownback and Ed Gillespie must have been a lot of people who were angry just a year earlier.

It is in this context that I call foul on Jonathan Chait in an article yesterday, Why the New Lawsuit Won’t Kill Obamacare. The irony is that I’ve made the same case. The truth is that the people will be hopping mad if they suddenly find the Supreme Court has caused their healthcare premiums to skyrocket. In a sane world, those people would blame the Republicans. Indeed, they might very well well blame the Republicans. For a month. Maybe two. But by November 2016, I doubt they will remember their anger. Whatever anger they might have will easily be transferred to the Democrats.

The real problem is that Obama forced a government take over of healthcare. In a real American “free market” system you would have no problem! You didn’t have this problem before Obamacare, did you? So it’s Obama’s fault! It’s the Democrats’ fault! The Republicans aren’t responsible for this. They didn’t even want this law. They were looking out for you the whole time when they were doing everything they could to deprive you of healthcare and make you pay as much as possible. Yeah, that’s the ticket! It’s the Democrats who did this do you!

Trust me, I’d love to believe that this isn’t the case. But think about the situation in Iraq right now. Do you really think the Sunday morning political shows would be featuring all the guys who screwed up the situation in Iraq in the first place if it weren’t for the fact that the viewing audience hadn’t totally forgotten who was responsible for the Iraq War? George W Bush currently has a higher approval rating than Barack Obama. Why is that? Because the American electorate has the memory of a goldfish.

I have to wonder if there is something wrong with Chait. Because he noted that while this would be a Democratic victory, it might take years to achieve. And what of those people — huge numbers of which would die? This is not all about politics. Ultimately — in the last paragraph of an 18 paragraph article — he argues that this is why John Roberts won’t waste his political capital on this case. I tend to agree that Roberts is not going to go along with this ridiculous lawsuit. But I doubt very seriously that his calculation includes a five year political battle that the Republicans might lose.

The Republicans are remarkably good at getting people to vote based on resentment of the wrong people. And I have no problem believing that a clear majority might vote against the Democrats for giving “those people” healthcare and thus harming the good hard working Americans who the Republicans have spent the last 34 years harming. And I know as a matter of fact that Jonathan Chait knows this. So I don’t know who he is trying to fool. Maybe himself.

As we watch Wisconsin on its way to becoming a “right to work” state, it is a good time to think about what all this means. Note that it shows the total lack of any actual integrity on the part of conservatives. While Scott Walker and others were going about destroying public sector unions, the argument was always that these were public employees and that they thus shouldn’t be allowed to have those fat pay checks. (Leave aside for now the fact that they don’t get over paid and the idea that government workers should be the worst we can get.) But when it comes down to it, they are all for destroying private sector unions as well.

Basically, “right to work” laws take away rights. They make it illegal for a business to make an exclusive contract with a union. Which basically means that the union is destroyed — either quickly or slowly. Given that the United States government hasn’t enforced labor laws in over three decades, businesses that don’t want unions really don’t have to have them. But there it is still bad PR to be had by a business that destroys an existing union, so this is a way to make them wither away on their own. The bottom line is the bottom line: it is a way to take even more money away from workers and give it to owners.

Hooray! Is this what conservative voters really want? Very few of them, I think. But names matter, and “right to work” sounds great! It makes it sound like unions are keeping people unemployed, even though the opposite is true. And there is also the issue that a great many people who are not in unions resent people who are. The worst aspects of human nature play right into the hands of the conservative elites. Workers are much more likely to blame their bad lives on workers who are doing marginally better than they are than to blame the owners who suppress their wages and their rights.

Let’s think about the minimum wage for a moment. I want to shift from thinking about conservatives generally to thinking about libertarians, who are, after all, the keepers of conservative economic thought. The libertarian argument against the minimum wage is not, as most libertarians I talk to seem to think, that it will “cost jobs.” That’s not an ideological argument. The libertarian argument — the “freedom” argument — is that the state has no business interfering in the contracts of the employer and the employee. If workers want to take jobs digging ditches for one dollar per hour for some company, that should be their right as a workers. Now there are all kinds of things wrong with this argument, but let’s just leave it at that.

But when it comes to those same workers wanting to collectively bargain with that same business, the libertarians scream, “No, no, no!” What’s different? Why is the “freedom” to take a low paying job so important, but the freedom of workers to negotiate on something close to an equal footing not? I think the reason should be clear. Libertarians just hate workers and unions. Their idea is that if workers had any gumption, they would have their own businesses. And indeed, I have heard libertarians argue for a world without workers. (This is ridiculous: it is simply a world where everyone is an independent contractor — a world that has never existed for reasons that are obvious to everyone but libertarians. Hint: it’s inefficient.)

To be fair, there are libertarians who are pro-union and very much against “right to work” laws. When I was a libertarian, I was one. And I remember several years back reading an article in Reason by a similarly inclined libertarian against “right to work” laws. And the comments blasted him from beginning to end. I never managed to see a single comment that agreed. And the reason was plain to see: the commenters just hated unions. In their eyes, they were all “entrepreneurs!”

Now some person might point out that liberals have the same problem: they are against “right to work” laws and for the minimum wage. That’s right! The point is that liberals hold these positions because they want to empower workers. Conservatives hold the opposite views because they want to deny power to workers. And as Matt Yglesias would say, “That’s great!” Everyone is entitled to whatever vile ideas they like. But don’t give me any of this garbage about caring about “freedom.” Conservatives care about enriching the rich and empowering the powerful and that is the end of the story.

So now Wisconsin is going to get a new “right” and that is the right to have one less right. Well played conservatives. Well played.

Single panel above taken from the great work at Lefty Cartoons. Go buy a shirt!