Jon Stewart took aim at the National Football League on The Daily Show last night, and it got ugly. He recapped the entire Ray Rice debacle, from the night the Baltimore Ravens running back knocked his then-fiancée Janay Palmer Rice unconscious in an Atlantic City elevator all the way to yesterday's breaking news, and by the time Stewart was done, theres was nothing left to do but pick up the pieces. He took to calling the NFL The League of Exculpatory Gentleman, and started by shitting all over NFL commissioner Roger Goodell's initial decision to suspend Rice two games for knocking out a woman.
"A two-game slap, one for each wrist," Stewart said.
He then went on to mock the NFL's new policy to suspend its woman-beating athletes six games for their first offense.
"Let that be a lesson to NFL players everywhere," he said. "If you hit a woman, they will not let you hit a man for six more weeks."
But the NFL and some of its minions this week took the stance that the league had never seen the video, so there was no way to know exactly how Janay Palmer Rice ended up unconscious on the elevator floor, and without that knowledge, a harsher ruling would be unjust.
And this is right where Stewart hit his stride as he summarized this week's events, first speeding through TMZ unveiling a second TMZ video on Monday, which showed Rice punching his fiancée in the face twice. Stewart slowed up just enough to jab at ESPN's coverage of the case, then got to the good stuff: yesterday's Associated Press report that a law enforcement official in fact sent the NFL the second video showing the events in the elevator all the way back in April. This would mean that the league had seen Rice knock Palmer unconscious, and and made the informed decision it was a shruggable offense.
"You done fucked up," Stewart said.