ED MORRISSEY: Jon Stewart on Tapper: Say, Remember When Reporters Actually Reported News When They Found It?
Despite clear and public evidence manifesting nearly every time Biden appeared and spoke, CNN didn’t bother to ask the questions that Tapper asked for his book research. In fact, CNN — Tapper included — actively criticized those who did raise the issue of Biden’s cognitive health, happily parroting the White House line about Sharp As A Tack® and Runs Rings Around Aides Half His Age, while watching Biden get lost repeatedly on stages and having the Easter Bunny Intervention.
But in that same sense … where was Jon Stewart during the same period of time? By February 2024, Stewart began to gently poke at Biden’s age, Ed Driscoll reminds us, which means Stewart did better than all of his late-night comic competitors save Bill Maher. (Even that got him a sharp backlash from progressives.) But as Christian Toto reminds us, Stewart never bothered to do much more until the debate made Biden’s incapacity too obvious to pretend otherwise:
Legacy Media collectively lied to the American public. So did Democrat after Democrat after Democrat. And millions took them at their word.
Imagine if the GOP did the same thing. Would Stewart respond with a shrug as he did last night?
The shocking cover-up is perfect fodder for a truth-telling satirist like Stewart. Yet he mostly avoided the subject over the past year-plus and hasn’t targeted those who propagated one of the biggest political lies in modern history.
Until now.
This week, Biden’s decline is on everyone’s lips – as is the tragic news of his prostate cancer.
Why now? It’s Clean-Up on Aisle 4 … there’s a mid-term election next year, and this must be dealt with and put back under the rug.
The Easter Bunny Intervention took place in April 2022. It took nearly two years after that for Stewart to offer a lame joke about Biden looking old on TikTok.
So in a sense, while Stewart’s rant is a welcome focus on the Protection Racket Media hypocrisy, it’s also a useful reminder that the Daily Show and other late-night comics were just as much a part of that same hypocrisy. And that includes Stewart.
But with fellow leftists turning on him, and everyone digging up his past ongoing protection of Biden, no wonder Tapper has hired a “PR flack who repped Elizabeth Holmes, Jeffrey Toobin, and Anthony Weiner” before beginning his book’s rollout.
