If there's one thing late night talk shows love to rip apart more than self-righteous hypocrisy, it's guests who cancel on them at the last minute and give them an excuse to take off the gloves and do it. Last night just that went down on The Daily Show when CNBC's Rick Santelli backed out his scheduled appearance on the show and prompted Jon Stewart to spend the first eight minutes of the show tearing CNBC to shreds.
Stewart has a tendency to hush his studio audience down when their "rah rah" mentality gets a little too sycophantic for his tastes. But Santelli crossing him must have fired up the host as he found himself basking in the moment of defending the failed mortgage homeowners looking for bailout money that Santelli became famous for his recent rant against. Stewart even glowed that he found "cheap populism oddly arousing."
As the clip makes the rounds today, Daily Intel is the only place so far we've seen sticking up for CNBC (much to their own surprise). If the cancellation did really come at the 23rd hour, then The Daily Show research and editing staff sure didn't look caught off-guard in putting together another one of their top notch packages to bury CNBC in so many of the ways the network falls short. It's almost a shame to think that one has to become an enemy of the show in order for them to come out swinging with such reckless (yet wonderful) abandon.
