Seth Meyers
“In order to claim that what’s happening in Afghanistan right now came out of nowhere, you have to willfully ignore or erase 20 years of history,” said Seth Meyers on Wednesday evening. “The Washington elite repeatedly lied about how the war was going, which is exactly what so many in the media, and especially the rightwing ghouls who got us into this mess – the Karl Roves, the John Boltons of the world – have been doing.”
The Late Night host zeroed in on the former White House press secretary-turned-Fox News contributor Kayleigh McEnany, who appeared on the network on Tuesday and “made it clear she’s fully inhabiting an alternate reality”.
McEnany excoriated Biden for his handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and added: “When Trump was president, you didn’t see crisis after crisis. I shudder to think about what Covid would’ve been like under Biden.”
“Well she’s right about one thing: you didn’t see crisis after crisis if you were watching Fox,” Meyers retorted. “More than 400,000 Americans died from Covid under Trump. Also, he got it and his rallies and White House parties were super-spreader events. Trump personally helped spread more disease to more people than a community swimming pool filled with water from the East River.”
Meyers went on with just a partial accounting of Trump’s scandals: “To say that Trump didn’t cycle through crisis after crisis is to ignore that much of his inner circle got indicted, his cabinet had like half a dozen corruption scandals, he praised Nazis, kidnapped migrant children, fired or tried to fire the people investigating him, got caught paying hush money to a porn star, incited a violent insurrection to overthrow an election, helped Saudi Arabia cover up a murder, single-handedly caused the longest government shutdown in American history, and told the Boy Scouts a story about yachts and New York parties.”
He saved his ire for GOP figureheads such as Bolton, Rove and McEnany who have been “opining shamelessly on cable news about how they would’ve handled the situation [in Afghanistan], and the pro-Trump crowd that negotiated and celebrated the deal with Taliban to withdraw are hypocritically piling on Biden for following through”.
Jimmy Fallon
On the Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon discussed a reassurance from Johnson & Johnson that their booster shot provides a “rapid and robust” increase in Covid antibodies. “Kinda like Chef Boyardee saying ‘our new sauce is robust in flavor’,” he said.
In other health risk news, doctors have taken to the media to warn of the dangers of the milk crate challenge, in which people climb a pyramid of stacked crates. “Half of Americans said, ‘of course’, while the other half said, ‘It’s my choice and I want to do my own research,’” Fallon joked. “Seriously, imagine surviving a global pandemic then having your family find out the milk crate challenge is what got you.”
And in a dramatic reversal, OnlyFans will continue to allow sexually explicit content, days after it announced a ban. “So between this and the new Spider-Man trailer, what a week for teenage boys,” said Fallon. “Thank goodness because without this, where else would be you able to find this stuff online?”
