Free Republic

Just two weeks after the broadcast networks mourned “cultural icon” Jon Stewart leaving The Daily Show, Friday’s NBC Today and CBS This Morning touted an online petition on the liberal Change.org website urging the Commission on Presidential Debates to select the left-wing comedian as a 2016 debate moderator. On Today, co-host Matt Lauer wondered: “Could the presidential race be in Jon Stewart's future?” Fill-in weatherperson Dylan Dryer followed: “Well, that’s the hope of a lot of people....A Change.org petition requesting Stewart moderate one of the 2016 presidential debates has been signed almost 140,000 times and that number is growing by...

Of recent late-night comedy shows to go off the air, the one with the steepest decline in its final year was Jon Stewart’s. In his concluding performance, Stewart had 3.5 million viewers, and in his last year he had an average of 1.5 million viewers per show.

Before he left The Daily Show, Jon Stewart asked people to look for evidence of him toting water for Obama so we did.

Many liberals, but not conservatives, believe there is an important asymmetry in American politics. These liberals believe that people on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum are fundamentally different. Specifically, they believe that liberals are much more open to change than conservatives, more tolerant of differences, more motivated by the public good and, maybe most of all, smarter and better informed. The evidence for these beliefs is not good. Liberals turn out to be just as prone to their own forms of intolerance, ignorance and bias. But the beliefs are comforting to many. They give their bearers a sense of...

Today is the 70th anniversary of President Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima. Today is also Jon Stewart’s final appearance as host of The Daily Show. Given the confluence of these two events, I somehow neglected to mention perhaps the daftest thing Stewart ever did during his 16 years host of The Daily Show in my rather brutal assessment of his intelligence and his comedic talents. Remember in 2009 when Stewart told Cliff May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, that President Truman was a war criminal because he dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

For Jon Stewart, this certainly isn’t the high note he wanted to go out on. The guy who prides himself on speaking truth to power, as the anti-establishment, take-to-both-sides-hero for millennials everywhere… reduced to a stenographer for a sitting president so thin-skinned about any and all criticism that he needs to dictate his own comedy. As originally reported in Politico by Darren Samuelson, the outgoing Daily Show host met with President Barack Obama twice in the past four years but failed to let anyone know about it. It was only then that Stewart — who loves to play the “I’m...

[VIDEO] Some weeks ago, Trevor Noah was named as the next host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central. And as usual whenever anything happens ever, a bunch of people got outraged. This would be an utter non-event except for how marvelously it demonstrated the hypocrisy of the progressive Thought Police. You’ve really got to love it. Noah is a South African comedian just obscure enough to preside over the show as it hurtles into irrelevance, which it will inevitably do once its current host, Jon Stewart, leaves. But this is 2015, which means even the most meaningless and unremarkable...

“I’d covered an election four times, and it didn’t appear that there was going to be anything wildly different about this one,” late-night host says in new interview

RUSH: An economist at the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics -- this is an Obama administration official -- is undergoing a review after she apparently sent out a tweet claiming that Christians vote for Nazis. Economist Elizabeth Ashack's Twitter account, sometime over the weekend, appeared to tweet out, "People in the red states vote for Nazis to govern and then call themselves Christian. It will not end well for them." And then she includes the hashtag #BoycottIndiana. They captured the screen shot of the tweet. It was captured by somebody called SooperMexican.com, S-o-o-p-e-r. Now, the tweet obviously is a...

They say anti-Semitism is a lot like alcoholism. Every recovering alcoholic knows their disease has no cure—that the seeds for its active return are always there, just below the surface of normalcy, requiring a constant lifelong vigilance to prevent. So, too, with anti-Semitism, sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred. No matter how long it may appear dormant, it never goes away.-snip- The newest twist on this oldest of games is to apply the term "anti-Semitism" to supporters of Israel. In this bizarro world, the only "true" friends of Israel are the ones who make their support for continued existence of the Jewish...

They say anti-Semitism is a lot like alcoholism. Every recovering alcoholic knows their disease has no cure—that the seeds for its active return are always there, just below the surface of normalcy, requiring a constant lifelong vigilance to prevent. So, too, with anti-Semitism, sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred. No matter how long it may appear dormant, it never goes away. It is always there.

It may be hard for Jon Stewart fans to imagine, but the beloved Daily Show host is "anything but warm and fuzzy," according to staffers quoted in Lisa Rogak’s new biography of the comedian, Angry Optimist: The Life and Times of Jon Stewart. One tells the story of a time Stewart screamed in a producer's face and threw a newspaper at her, only to later apologize and explain, "Sorry, that's bad Jon. ... I try not to let him out." There are more such tales of Stewart's angry side in the book, Forbes reports, and Rogak notes, "I'm surprised that...

I suppose you could give Campbell Brown and John Heilemann credit for candor. They've made it clear that when it comes to qualifications for replacing Jon Stewart as Daily Show host, there is one fatal flaw: being a conservative. On today's With All Due Respect, Brown and John Heilemann were kicking around the results of a poll as to whom Americans prefer to replace Stewart. Tina Fey came in first, with Dennis Miller a close second. Said Brown: "I can't imagine Dennis Miller. Hasn't he gone right wing?" Heilemann agreed: "that's not going to work." View the video here.

Marco Rubio probably could have done without the praise from host Jon Stewart during his appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” Tuesday. During an occasionally awkward interview, the conservative Florida senator ultimately charmed Stewart while explaining some of the economic proposals in his new book, “American Dreams.”

As Newsbusters' Jeffrey Meyer wrote earlier today, Jon Stewart lobbed softballs to Hillary Clinton last night on the Daily Show. It would have been nice if he asked if she were reconsidering the possiblility of running for president due to her book sales tumbling so quickly or what she thinks about the possibility of Elizabeth Warren running for the same office.  However the interview was significant in one respect: Hillary gaves the strongest hint yet that she is definitely going to throw her pantsuit into the ring. It came at the 1:30 mark of this video when Hillary answered Stewart's...

President Obama’s biggest problem when it comes to selling the American public on the so-far rocky rollout of his health-care law isn’t John Boehner or Mitch McConnell or even Ted Cruz. It’s Jon Stewart. (snip) Stewart dedicated the entire first 10 minutes of his show — three full segments — on Monday to slashing hits on the Web site and the president’s handling of the problems. He compared Obama to “Gil”, the hapless salesman from “The Simpsons”, showed “Daily Show” correspondent John Oliver stuck in a computer after trying to sign up for Obamacare and expressed amazement that even the...

From his appearance on the Tonight Show

Generation Xers mourning Stewart’s departure ought to be thanking the man who made the awkward comedian’s long tenure of pulling faces while making snide remarks possible; President Bush. George W. Bush made Jon Stewart. Even Stewart has admitted that his show came into its own when Bush did. A world in which a President Gore spent eight years sonorously lecturing Americans about his love for the trees is also a world in which Jon Stewart would be out there doing pizza commercials. It was Bush’s victory that took a flailing cable show hosted by an irritating little standup comedian with...

There are few transcendent principles that continually prove themselves more than Liberals Stick Together.  In a hagiographic fantasy, The Wrap published an interview with CNN chief Jeff Zucker, who made the funniest joke I've heard since Night Court went off the air: “Everyone said we were getting out of news — we doubled-down on news.” CNN really needs to re-evaluate its acronym. Now that Comedy Central is getting out of the news business, CNN should change it’s name to the Comedy News Network, and give Zucker his own show, because I laughed myself silly at the “doubled-down” remark.  In fact, they should call the...

Our baby is all grown up. Jon Stewart, America’s most-overrated perennial adolescent, has shed his Gen X jammies and is poised to finally move out of the house. Sayonara, Jon. Unlike Brian Williams, you got away with it. Comedy Central has done well monetizing “The Daily Show” and you’ve become a very rich man perpetrating one of the greatest frauds upon the culture in entertainment history.