Jon Stewart: Conservative.
Really? In the eyes of some liberal commentators after the longtime host’s return to “The Daily Show” on Monday … yes.
Mr. Stewart took some shots at President Biden’s declining mental acuity in his first show back … and the knives came out.
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann called Mr. Stewart a “bulls—t bothsidesist” for making fun of a Democrat at a moment of national crisis.
“Well after nine years away, there’s nothing else to say to the bothsidesist fraud Jon Stewart bashing Biden, except: Please make it another nine years,” he said.
In Mr. Stewart’s opening monologue, the comic showed a barrage of clips of Democrats hailing Mr. Biden’s alertness and brilliance in their personal interactions, and then he punctured them with the words “did anyone film that?”
“You should film that. That would be good to show to people,” he dryly and slowly said before turning to similar criticism of former President Donald Trump, who is only three years younger than Mr. Biden.
Aaron Rupar reposted a clip that included that moment and said any parallel of the two men is morally unacceptable.
“Jon Stewart still has it in terms of being funny and entertaining but the political content of this monologue is basically the New York Times op-ed page in TV form,” he said. “Both sides are not in fact equally bad!”
Other left-wing and anti-Trump grousing included in a Fox News roundup of reactions came from the Daily Beast — “using his old platform to tell Americans that their two choices for president are both not that different and equally terrible” — and former Rep. Joe Walsh — “boring, tired, not helpful, way too easy of a take.”
Mr. Walsh said yoking the two men downplays the differences in his eyes.
“It’s Biden v Trump. A binary decision. We can spend our time b——ing about ‘two old guys,’ or we can spend our time making sure the one old guy – who’s also a traitorous psychopath who tried to overthrow an election – doesn’t win again,” he wrote on X.