During the latest episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver went deep on Temporary Assistance For Needy Families, or TANF, a program that’s supposed to help lift families out of property. Instead, it routinely fails, and in the case of Brett Favre, it apparently enhanced the lives of the wealthy. The former NFL quarterback has been embroiled in a scandal in Mississippi where he allegedly helped to arrange for welfare funds from TANF to build a $5 million volleyball stadium at his daughter’s college. It was a gross misuse of public funds, and Oliver meticulously skewered Favre over the scandal.
“I’m a little surprised you even need a stadium to play volleyball in,” Oliver quipped. “I thought it was a sport mainly played outdoors by sexually frustrated men who aren’t wearing shirts and sporty dogs who unexpectedly are. But clearly, I was wrong about that.”
The late night host then went to town on text messages from Favre where he specifically asks, “Is there any way the media can find out where it came from and how much?”
“Brett, I have some terrible news for you,” Oliver said. “The media did find out. That’s what’s happening right now.”
Oliver then highlighted how needy families rarely qualify for TANF benefits in Mississippi, which makes the Favre scandal all the more egregious.
“That’s pretty infuriating to hear,” he said. “And it gets even worse when you learn that in Mississippi last year of roughly 190,000 children living in poverty, just 2,600 were receiving money from TANF while, remember, of the roughly one Brett Favres in Mississippi, 100% of them managed to get $5 million for this f*cking volleyball stadium. It’s enough to make you want to see Brett Favre hit in the nuts with a football.”
Oliver then noted that, legally, Favre claims that he did nothing wrong and that the NFL star had no idea where the funds were coming from. He also returned $1.1 million that he was personally paid, but Oliver isn’t buying his excuse.
“It’s not clear exactly where he thought the money was coming from,” the Last Week Tonight host said. “Perhaps he thinks there’s some pot of taxpayer money that he can just dip his sausage fingers into whenever he needs something. I don’t know. He’s been hit in the head a lot. Not enough, but a lot.”