JS should actually pay Tucker Carlson to do stuff every week, because he is a never-fail foil. They could make him a Monday correspondent for the show, except instead of having to write and produce segments they just send him out into the world to be himself.
Would have been just funny, except the context that made TC relevant and worth talking about was one of the most heartbreaking, outrageous and momentous political murders of our time so, hard to laugh too much, when I was still wiping away the tears from reading pieces about Navalny and his widow like the one by Julia Iofee at Puck News.
What I found most of note about Week 2 of the new Stew was how apparently pissed off he was at criticism of his both siding Trump and Biden, especially apparently at Mary Trump (who I think is the kind of person Stewart would like to have as a “Friend of the Show” during the Fall campaign). His brief response really confirmed for me how much he does not get it. The criticism is not that he owes it to democracy and Democrats to only make fun of Trump.
JS painted himself as the heroic truth teller who had the balls to say out loud what everyone else knows but is afraid to say (that Biden is old). But of course that is the opposite of what is going on. For the last year at least Everyone has been joking and complaining about how old Biden is. There is nothing new, insightful or courageous in that. Stewart is telling hack jokes that are the equivalent of how bad airplane food is on the flight from LA to NY, ir how White people walk like this, but Black people walk like this, and pretending he is on the cutting edge.
I don’t think most liberals expect or even want Stewart to give Biden a pass, just to put in the effort to make jokes that get at Biden’s real weaknesses or failures, and not designed to normalize and minimize Trump’s villainy.