“The Daily Show” relentlessly made fun of Texas and many Texans during an episode filmed in Texas Thursday.
In front of a hyperpartisan crowd in famously liberal Austin that jeered clips of Republicans and cheered the very mention of Democrats, Jon Stewart repeatedly adopted an exaggerated southern accent throughout a nine-minute clip, at one point mocking a renowned Texas war hero and otherwise kind and quiet lawmaker, Sam Johnson, who was imprisoned in Vietnam for seven years.
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From a 2006 Dallas Morning News story about Johnson:
For Rep. Sam Johnson, seven years in the “Hanoi Hilton” were more than enough. He vowed never to return to Vietnam, and for 33 years, he never did. But Thursday, home from a congressional trip, he recounted an hourlong visit to the infamous prison.
It all came back, he said – the shackles, the cramped cells, the softly coded taps that kept the prisoners of war sane.
“I might have had a tear or two,” he said.
He heard no apologies, nor even any overt acknowledgement of his POW status during meetings with top Vietnamese officials, though he said everyone seemed to go out of their way to be kind and make a good impression.
“They intimated that they were glad to have me back,” Mr. Johnson said by phone from his office in Richardson. “I’m glad to leave and come back to the United States.”
During his week-long stay in the Lone Star State, Stewart interviewed Wendy Davis, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate who exploited her wheelchair-bound opponent’s disability in a recent advertisement and later stood by her behavior.
