It's been bugging me all summer, and I had to take a break from the Daily Show a week ago, after Jon Stewart turned my stomach by delivering a near-jokeless lecture on the Swift Boat controversy.

Thankfully, the friendly libertarians at Reason magazine's blog noticed too:

Over at his new blog, Reason alumnus Ryan Sager complains that Jon Stewart, who kissed John Kerry's ass on The Daily Show last night, is becoming less funny as he becomes more openly partisan. I agree. The problem is not the attacks on Bush and the Republicans. Lord knows they deserve it, and even when The Daily Show goes after them for the wrong reasons, it's often funny. The problem is the lack of attacks on Kerry and the Democrats, who are equally ripe for mocking. On the increasingly rare occasions when the show does make fun of Democrats, it tends to be a gentle ribbing (e.g., references to Kerry's lack of charisma or his wife's money) rather than the ridicule they deserve. I fear that Stewart, despite his frequent protestations to the contrary ("As a fake journalist…"), has begun to take himself seriously.

As that Ryan Sager guy points out, people don't watch the Daily Show just because it's funny:

But people want more than comedy. They want the real world, but through a filter — a less pompous filter than they'll get from Aaron Brown and a less annoying filter than they'll get from Bill O'Reilly.

I do get my news from the Daily Show, some days. But I try to back it up with other (print) sources. So I'd add a complaint to the Reason piece: Not only is the Daily Show becoming less critical of the Democrats, it's becoming less concerned with the hilarious truth than with rebutting conservative attacks.

Witness Samantha Bee's fawning skit on Michael Moore or Stewart's assertion that the Swift Boat Veterans served with Kerry "in the same sense that Snoopy served with the Red Baron."

This stuff is still funny, but when I take a wishy-washy step back I can't help but notice that it's basically partisan misinformation. I mean, a few of those Swifty jerks were at the same battles where he got his medals, for instance. And people who just watch the Daily Show wouldn't have known that until Stewart was forced to admit it last week, so he could give the aforementioned lecture on discrepancies between one veteran's hostpital record and his Kerry story.

I miss the good old days, back when Jon Stewart at least claimed to be a moderate.