Jon Stewart argued on The Daily Show on Monday night that the most damaging thing uncovered in the probe into alleged malfeasance by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the outdated formats federal agencies apparently use to communicate.

“Our government’s handling of information across all platforms borders on criminal idiocy,” he said. “The IRS is frying hard drives; the VA’s drowning in paper. Is there any record-keeping medium that the government could use that could work for them? Microfiche would do it. Stone tablets would do it. We could take a page out of the ancient Greeks — weave all of our information into an epic poem and recite it entirely from memory, passed down over generations as part of a federal archival oral tradition from bard to apprentice, but you’d probably lose the f*cking page.”

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Stewart said that Republicans have seemingly taken pleasure in grilling former IRS official Lois Lerner and other agency personnel over the loss of two years’ worth of emails following a 2011 computer crash.

But he also noted that, even if her computer had functioned perfectly until the present day, the agency only kept emails for six months at a time, anyway, and Lerner’s mailbox capacity was only the IRS-standard 150 megabytes.

“Also known as, five pictures of your family,” he explained. “Or one picture of Anthony Weiner’s c*ck.”

But Stewart then deduced that the entire affair was a passive-aggressive attempt by the federal government to initiate a breakup with Americans.

“I want you to remember this: just because we’re totally unreasonable doesn’t mean you have to be totally incompetent,” he said.

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Watch Stewart’s commentary, as posted online on Monday, below.



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