I love "The Daily Show," but...

I love The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I watch the show, along with The Colbert Report, rather religiously. Stewart and Colbert are probably the two biggest influences on the satire I write. Even in saying that, however, there are times when I think Stewart has trouble treading the line between comedian and journalist, tries too hard to be balanced, and gets in these moods where he's angry at the world and decides to be, for lack of a better word, a dick to his guest. Last night's episode was a prime example of that.

Stephen Colbert doesn't run into this problem often, because his show is viewed as a comedy. He's seen as a comedian and not as a journalist to some. His show and personality are satirizing The O'Reilly Factor and host Bill O'Reilly. When Colbert comes across as a jerk to his guests, that's just him being in character. Jon Stewart, meanwhile, isn't satirizing a character on his show. The guy is being himself, and while a majority of his bits trend toward comedy, he tends to bounce back and forth between being goofy and serious and there are times guests catch him in a mood when they likely wonder why they came on the show in the first place. I'm sure Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius felt his way after last night's back-and-forth with Stewart. 

Since the start of the government shutdown, Jon Stewart has blasted the Republican Party for its role in the shutdown and has stated that it's absolute nonsense to place equal blame on the two parties. Last night, he decided to balance things out a bit more, in basically calling Democrats the party of incompetence and Republicans as the party of nihilism. The incompetence claim is due to widespread reports of problems signing up for Obamacare at healthcare.gov in its first week and the nihilism claim is due to the GOP threatening default with regard to the debt ceiling if President Obama doesn't agree to delay the Affordable Care Act for a year. While I agree the early glitches at healthcare.gov are frustrating, comparing that to the GOP's threat of potentially sending us to another depression is pretty ridiculous. 

When Kathleen Sebelius then came onto the show, Stewart decided to try and go the unfunny-Abbott-and-Costello route, where he continually asked Sebelius why mandates for businesses were delayed a year, but not mandates for individuals. While Sebelius did a fairly poor job in answering Stewart's question(s), it seemed pretty obvious from the outset that Sebelius was handed a list of things to say and she wasn't going to stray from that. I can understand Stewart's frustration when it comes to such guests, but repeating the same question over and over again isn't going to clarify matters any. In any case, like he does sometimes, Stewart wasn't giving Sebelius much time to talk and when she did, he'd quickly try to one-up her. While he's been fairly defensive of Obamacare through the years, he went on the offensive against it when Sebelius sat down - going on a tangent about how a single-payer system would make more sense than the current healthcare reform plan. While I agree with him on the matter, I'm also realistic in knowing that such a plan had absolutely no chance to pass through Congress when the Affordable Care Act was passed three years ago, and it would have no chance to pass today. It's not as if the individual mandate was President Obama's first choice for a healthcare reform plan. However, he had to compromise on the matter to make the bill passable. 

I've seen Stewart get like this before, albeit rarely. I don't know if perhaps it's that time of the month for him (yes, men can get periods too...), if perhaps he allows anger to build until he reaches a boiling point every now and again, or what exactly, but for as much as I love the show, it is difficult for me to watch when he gets like that.