CLOWN NOSE OFF: Jon Stewart’s Vicious Smear.

Their confusion, and Stewart’s, is rooted in the fact that so many Republican lawmakers voted in favor of cloture in June but against cloture last week. “They’re manufacturing reasons to vote against legislation that they literally voted for just last month,” said one frustrated veteran who appeared alongside Stewart. “And so, it’s really a new level of low.” Advocates for this worthy cause don’t even address the simplest explanation for Senate Republicans’ reversal, which is by no means exculpatory of Republicans, that Toomey and his staff read the legislation more carefully than his GOP colleagues. It must be that those senators, some of whom are veterans themselves, “don’t support veterans.”

“This is the oldest trick in Washington,” Toomey said with due contempt for those who accused him of being a “f***ing coward.” Lawmakers “take a sympathetic group of Americans,” he continued, “craft a bill to address their problems and then sneak in something completely unrelated that they know could never pass on its own and dare Republicans to do anything about it.” It’s such a tired tactic that only those with virtually no exposure to legislative affairs in Washington could fail to comprehend Republican objections, even if they don’t agree with them. That does not describe Senate Democrats. It doesn’t even describe Jon Stewart. They bet that profound displays of anguish over the Republican Party’s heartlessness would find a credulous audience in the press, and they were correct.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The press isn’t “credulous.” It’s complicit.