Obama Only Transparent About 'the Last Guy': Stewart

Jon Stewart is pretty freaked out by the leaked DOJ memo authorizing the US government to kill American citizens, he confessed last night on the Daily Show. First of all, there's the fact that those citizens must be determined to be an "imminent threat"—but the government's extremely broad definition of the word "imminent" seems to be, "imminent or ... not imminent," Stewart pointed out. Then there's the fact that the administration is only showing the rest of the pertinent documents to certain members of Congress.

That's a bit hypocritical, considering how quick Obama was to release Bush-era DOJ memos regarding the CIA's use of controversial interrogation techniques in 2009—and how very, very angry Democrats including Joe Biden were in 2004 when John Ashcroft wouldn't release those very memos. The bottom line, according to Stewart: "We don't mind you knowing about the [bleep] we do once we don't do it anymore. We're happy to share irrelevant information with the public. We told you we were gonna be transparent, we just didn't tell you it was gonna be about the last guy's secrets." (More The Daily Show stories.)