Actor Bradley Whitford has spent nearly as much time in the fake White House — he starred on The West Wing (1999 to 2006) — as comedian Jon Stewart has spent on the fake news — he starred on The Daily Show from 1999 to 2015.
But while Whitford hasn’t returned to the faux-val office, Stewart is back on Comedy Central — and his first performance there enraged viewers, making even celebrities like Whitford who used to respect Stewart wishing TV had term limits.
On Stewart’s Monday night part-two debut back in the Daily Show chair, the comedian delivered an enervating exercise in disingenuous false equivalence that brought out savagery and alarm from critics, with the likes of Keith Olbermann lashing out about the “fraud Jon Stewart.” Stewart’s crime? He made Joe Biden and Donald Trump seem equally perilous to America.
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
— Keith Olbermann⌚️ (@KeithOlbermann) February 13, 2024
But Olbermann’s hit job was mild compared to Whitford’s excoriation of Stewart, long portrayed as a beacon of reason by left-leaning viewers who thought, among other things, that invading Iraq was an American catastrophe. (Stewart famously dubbed the debacle “Mess-o-potamia.”
Whitford, like Olbermann, excoriated Stewart’s “bothsidesism” and then set the record straight about the differences, as he sees them, between the two top presidential candidates: “One is still at the top of his game and historically effective in the most difficult job on the planet after coming out of retirement to unify Democrats and save democracy and the other is an incoherent blithering rapist/traitor who thinks veterans are ‘“’suckers’. But do go on…”
One is still at the top of his game and historically effective in the most difficult job on the planet after coming out of retirement to unify Democrats and save democracy and the other is an incoherent blithering rapist/traitor who thinks veterans are “suckers”. But do go on… https://t.co/FU9M6HqomF
— Bradley Whitford (@BradleyWhitford) February 14, 2024
