Jon Stewart Defends Rick Perry From Ed Schultz’s Race-Baiting Charges

By Frances Martel, Mediaite

For a good 24 hours there this week, Republican presidential candidate governor Rick Perry had to fend off charges of racism for calling the national debt a “big black cloud.” Huh? On tonight’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart got down to the bottom of charges mostly stemming from MSNBC that Perry had used the term for President Obama, and together with John Oliver and Wyatt Cenac found the culprit through a montage of clearly innocuous statements featuring names of colors from the network: “The real bigot here is Ed Schultz.”

After a roundup of the media’s incredibly short attention span that had them running from Rep. Michele Bachmann to Perry to Rep. Paul Ryan– a game he surmised to a child demanding his mother buy him all the latest toys (“and before I get you anything, where is your Ron Paul?!”), Stewart played the abridged clip of Perry referring to the cloud over America, followed by accusations that he was talking about the President. “What? Pretty sure Rick Perry was saying the black cloud was the debt,” Stewart noted– indeed, “debt” was only two words after “cloud” in Perry’s comments. “That’s the thing about clouds,” Stewart joked, “some people see a racist dog whistle, while some people see George Washington wrestling a leprechaun.”

Starts at 2:00 minute mark