First, some personal context: I'm a fan of Jon Stewart.
His show was a welcome breath of tart air, at a time when American broadcast media was still toadying up to the Bush administration over the tragedy unleashed on the people of Iraq.
The Daily Show struck a collective chord amongst Americans, most of them young, whose skepticism over the war steadily grew into shock and then revulsion.
Jon Stewart's contribution to the Iraq debate, by saying things about the White House that desperately needed to be heard but which mainstream news media lacked the courage to say, should not be underestimated.
His skill as an interviewer is something to behold. Here is a comedian, gifted with the knack for boiling down the complex into the understandable, without pandering, and for making the serious point while playing it for laughs. At times, it is pure genius.
And Stewart's impact has been felt well beyond Comedy Central. He provided a public service when he went on Crossfire, berating its hosts for "hurting America" and blowing that broadcast and Tucker Carlson right off CNN's airwaves.
All with the power of the word.
But he's gotta stop with the John McCain stuff.
Senator McCain was on the Daily Show again the other day -- for the eleventh time.
I get that Stewart likes to have people on his program who see things differently to the way he does. He is already broadcasting to the converted; he shouldn't always be interviewing them too.
And Stewart's smart enough to know that one way to keep right wing attack dogs off his case is to interview enough conservatives to balance the bias ledger.
He understands, too, that the conflict of ideas and ideologies makes for good TV. Some of his most memorable interviews have been with Bill Kristol, the neo-con who probably holds the record for getting the most things wrong about Iraq.
On one of Kristol's visits to the set this year, Stewart provided nothing short of a master class on how to dissect the absurd but often strangely effective neo-con arguments. Stewart absolutely demolished what Kristol was saying in a way Tim Russert can only dream of.
But John McCain is different. He is not, like Kristol, a columnist who goes on the Daily Show in order to flog books, and is willing to endure humiliation at Stewart's skilled hands to do it.
McCain is a candidate for President of the United States. And he lies.
McCain's most recent appearance was made over the phone from New Hampshire and the two men tossed around ideas for new names for McCain's campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express.
They kibitzed a little. They called each other my friend and joked about how McCain's 11th appearance on the show was a record.
There was no examination of the candidate's ideas, no exploration of McCain's ludicrous statements on the so-called "Petraeus" (read: White House) report on the so-called surge (read: escalation).
As this link documents -- McCain not only misquoted and mischaracterized what some very prominent voices were saying in relation to the general's testimony, he misquoted what he himself had said at the Petraeus hearings.
Then McCain jumped on the anti-MoveOn.org bandwagon, saying that, after publishing the Petraeus/Betray Us ad in the New York Times, the organization should be moved right on out of the country.
(Incidentally, given that MoveOn claims two million members, which is roughly how many refugees the Iraq war has produced, does McCain have any suggestions for where we can move them on to?)
This is a man who, wearing a flak-jacket, surrounded by hundreds of soldiers and with attack helicopters hovering overhead, declared that market in Baghdad to be perfectly safe.
There is nothing, not even running for president, that excuses that kind of dishonesty; the peddling of dangerous lies in order to prolong a war that has cost tens, probably hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.
But as Stewart said, repeatedly, in their most recent broadcast encounter, John McCain is his friend.
By giving this kind of politician a free pass on his show, Jon Stewart is doing the very thing he has quite rightly criticized the mainstream media for: failing to do the job we have come to expect from him.
He may be helping his friend, the candidate. But he's hurting America.
And it's not funny.