Jon Stewart on Tim Cook’s Less-Than-Taxing Senate Reception

Apple CEO Tim Cook’s appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations earlier this week to defend Apple’s tax practices was a largely uneventful affair, particularly given the issues at hand.

While the subcommittee panel described Apple on paper as an “egregious offender” that has “sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” it took a very different tone while meeting in person with Cook. “So nice to meet you. I have an iPad,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R.-N.H., said while greeting the Apple CEO — a cordial, but fawning, welcome, surpassed only by that of her counterpart, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. who said simply: “I love Apple. … I love Apple.”

All of this was great fodder for Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” team. As Stewart quipped during last night’s broadcast, “Who are those people? What is the opposite of a Genius Bar?”

“Apparently there is nothing Apple can do to get us mad at them,” Stewart marveled. “We could find out they’re using kitten hearts to power iPhones and we’d be like, ‘Well, if it doubles battery life, I’ll take two!'”