With the interesting week in the news we had last week, it’s understandable if you missed a significant story that slipped under the news cycle’s radar. As you probably figured out from the title of this post, Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show last night. No, he’s not coming back completely as full time host, but he’s coming back to produce and host one night per week. For me personally, Stewart always fell into that rare category of entertainer who I never liked but could respect for his ability at his craft. While 20 years ago Stewart was mandatory viewing for all of my DC Lefty friends, I found Stewart, snarky, intellectually dishonest, and at the end of the day… kind of boring. But he was great at pushing the Radical Left’s agenda while making his opponents look like idiots. The article I linked by The American Conservative’s Nate Hoshman nails Stewart’s rise and fall:
The more salient reason for Stewart’s decline is that he was a man born for—and shaped by—a particular place and time, and that the conditions that enabled his decade of success have long since departed. Stewart’s brand of smirking, needling, speaking-truth-to-power liberalism made a certain degree of sense in the Bush era, when there was at least a plausible case that the left was “anti-establishment.” (Or even that there could be such a thing as an “anti-establishment left” at all). His demeanor may not have endeared him to most conservatives, but it was charming to a certain genre of disaffected young liberal who felt alienated from the centers of power governing America at the turn of the century. In today’s context, however, Stewart’s schtick is worse than boring—it’s obnoxious.
Read the whole thing. Hoshman gives a thorough analysis of Stewart’s trajectory and everything wrong with Stewart. One of Stewart’s more effective tactics that I both respected and despised was
He criticized Citizens United, corporate consolidation, and political corruption, and spoke favorably of marijuana legalization and gay rights. He pioneered the now-popular tactic of “nutpicking” by finding and elevating the most ludicrous and uninformed right-wing critics of such measures and mocking them mercilessly.
I’ll concede that Stewart was savagely effective at making opponents of The Radical Left’s agenda look like idiots. I also hated his intellectual dishonesty. When his “nutpicking” wasn’t effective enough, The Daily Show relied on slice & dice editing to mask when they actually did lose the argument. I remember an old Mark Steyn article where he was invited to appear on The Daily Show, or Colbert, or something like that. Steyn had one simple demand, that the show be broadcast live. Knowing that they were outgunned, the Lefties graciously fled.
And this is what I will always despise about Stewart. He’s always been an intellectual lightweight who does a great job of fooling Lefties into thinking he’s intelligent. He’s incapable of honest debate because he knows the facts aren’t on his side. And he is a top enabler of the collective ignorance, dishonesty, and outright malevolence that governs today’s Democrats.
His debut last night got some praise from Lefties, but Twitter had a collective meltdown because Stewart had the audacity to direct some of his fire at a famous dementia patient. Of course, these fools forgot how Stewart operates. He’s throw a light punch at someone on his side as a setup to give both barrels of his dishonesty at the Normals. Note here how he mentions Sundown Joe* having memory problems as a segue to show Trump’s kids saying t hey have no memory of certain details in court. Brilliant move jackass; maybe you don’t understand why people go to careful lengths not get drawn into some Trumped up perjury charges for a slight contradiction under oath and have the FBI breaking down their doors? Stewart is also the standard bearer for why today’s Democrats are such horrible people – nobody outside of the Conservasphere will call out their wrongdoing. Stewart is why we have a congressman who *literally* had state secrets sucked out of him by a Chinese spy (sorry for that imagery), a former House Speaker who was probably responsible for ordering officers to open the doors at the January 6th Reichstag Fire, and how we have in the White House a senile, corrupt pedophilia dementia patient.
So how is Stewart’s return a gift for our side? Because in the post Stewart-run Daily Show world the show has hemorrhaged viewers, and nobody in the army of late night NPCs has come even close to building a following like Stewart’s. Stewart is getting dusted off because with nothing fresh or original to offer, the Democrats are ready to party like it’s 2004! But give Stewart credit, he has kept up to date with staying on top of the party’s critical issues, such as (checks notes)… calling for mutilating children. Well done, Jon – you perfectly represent today’s Democrats.
And on a minor programming note, the header image for this post was generated by AI. It’s the first time I’ve used it for this, and it probably won’t be the last. Thoughts?
So they let Jon Stewart out of a broom closet in a college dorm to bitch like an uninformed freshman some more?
— LaughAtLefties (@LaughAtLefties) February 13, 2024
I love that everyone was like “Jon Stewart, we need you”, but the minute he criticized Biden they’re like “No not like that” https://t.co/9Ef1obyLNs
— la befana🇵🇸 (@Sandinista412) February 13, 2024
Brother Bob is no longer on Facebook (although you can see his archives there), and is back on Twitter again, but is ramping up on Minds and Gab, and has his biggest presence on MeWe.
Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
Media creation, like all talking heads, he is of zero importance.
He is trotted out for an hour or so and we are to believe he is actually supporting?
He’ll be up against Gutfeld!, a late night juggernaut. It will be interesting to see if what I am sure will be a spike in ratings for his show maintains that spike or slowly peters out. He may not be able to resist exploiting the most comedy material rich person and regime in US history.