If there was any doubt who the host of NBC's Late Night With Seth Meyers is rooting for in next Tuesday's presidential election, his “A Closer Look” segment on Thursday's program made it obvious that he favors Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton over Republican rival Donald Trump.
“With the election still five days away,” he began his monologue, “Republicans are already threatening years of political paralysis if Hillary Clinton wins, with some promising to block her Supreme Count nominees for years and others saying she should be impeached."
“We're in the home stretch, and both sides are in overdrive, doing everything they can to get people to vote,” Meyers stated. “Tuesday in Ohio, for example, President Obama told supporters that if they went to the polls to vote early, they could also" get a free taco thanks to a World Series promotion.
“Because I've been watching the World Series,” Obama declared, “I am aware that because [Cleveland Indians Shortstop] Francisco Lindor stole second base in Game 1, everyone in America gets a free taco at Taco Bell tomorrow” as part of the restaurant chain's “Steal a Base, Steal a Taco” campaign.
“To be fair,” Meyers joked about a doctored photo, “they shouldn't make Joe Biden stand in the crowd” wearing a T-shirt that read 'I Love Tacos.'”
The comedian then noted:
By the way, what a sad state of affairs it is when you say: "Get out and vote. We have to stop an insane man from having the nuclear codes," and people go "Ehh," But then you say "free taco," and they're all "Yes. We. Can."
Now the closing stretch of the campaign, of course, has been dominated that suddenly, the very chatty FBI has discovered more emails potentially related to Hillary Clinton's private server, and Republicans are pulling out all the stops.
Nonetheless, “the investigation of Hillary's e-mails is a political gift for Trump. As long as he can stay on message and not say anything crazy, a task apparently so difficult for him that Trump had to give himself a 'pep talk' on stage at a rally in Florida yesterday.”
Next came a video of Trump stating: “In six days, we are going to win the great state of Florida, and we are going to win the White House. … It's feeling like it already, isn't it?”
“We've gotta be nice and cool, nice and cool, right?” the Republican candidate asked. “Stay on point, Donald; stay on point. No sidetracks, Donald, nice and easy, nice and easy.”
“He has to talk to himself about acting sane like he's on a diet,” Meyers asserted before mimicking Trump's voice saying: “OK, Donald. There's cake in the break room, but you don't need cake. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.”
“But the problem isn't Trump straying off-message,” the liberal comedian asserted. “The problem is his message. He's trying to cast Hillary Clinton as a potentially illegitimate president who would be mired in legal crises for years, and his rhetoric and that of the people around him has become increasingly rabid and unhinged.”
“At a recent rally in Nevada, for example, one of Trump's warm-up speakers was right-wing media personality Wayne Allyn Root,” who stated that he imagined Clinton in a car heading to the Mexican border and went so far as to name a movie about that as Driving Miss Hillary.
Meyers responded: “I don't know why you'd bring up Driving Miss Daisy. Wasn't that a movie about a black man who gets a white lady where she wants to go?” accompanied with a picture of Barack Obama at a rally with Hillary Clinton.
Complaining about members of the GOP threatening to impeach her without any evidence she's committed a crime, the host stated: "And if they can't do that, they'll settle for the next best thing: preventing her from filling any vacancies on the Supreme Court for her entire four-year term.”
“The hypocrisy here is especially brazen,” he said, “when you consider Republicans' excuse for stopping the nomination eight months ago of Merrick Garland” until a new president could be elected in November to “let the voters decide who they want.”
“Some in the GOP have destroyed some of our most important political norms,” Meyers concluded angrily. “They want to jail or impeach anyone they disagree with, and if they don't get to wield power, they want to paralyze the government so no one can. You'd think that would be enough to get people to the polls.”
Of course, the liberal comedian didn't mention who taught the GOP how to circumvent laws and other rules: the Democrats, who dominated Congress for about 40 years, when they used every trick in the book to prevent Republicans from promoting their values and policies.
