“I guess we’ve got ourselves an old-fashioned police department-professional football team standoff,” Jon Stewart wisely observed on Tuesday’s “Daily Show.”
Cops in St. Louis County, Missouri — which includes Ferguson — demanded an apology from the St. Louis Rams and action to punish five Rams players. Before taking the field Sunday, those players made a “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture, which became popular during the protests surrounding officer Darren Wilson’s killing of teenager Michael Brown.
Stewart could barely handle the horrifying irony that was in his face.
“Holy shit,” he deadpanned. “So, the St. Louis Police Association is angry and outraged to have been caught in this … hail of gestures, and feels the community won’t get past this … tragic pantomime, unless someone is held accountable. That’s the angle they’re going with.”
And then the beef got weird(er).
The St. Louis Rams organization initially said it wouldn’t punish the players involved, nor apologize for their actions. Shortly after that, it was reported that the team’s chief operating officer did, in fact, apologize to the police chief. The NFL team denied those reports, setting into motion a testy battle across social media that at one point led the cops to tweeting the actual definition of the word “apology.”
Of the back-and-forth, Stewart concluded, “Isn’t it interesting how witness testimony is so unreliable?”
