Oregon, Enjoying the Most Dramatic Politics in the Country at This Moment

Today on NRO

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: Jon Stewart's shtick is a poor substitute for discourse, but that's the state of contemporary progressivism. The Destroyer Goeth.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Brian Williams's lies are symptomatic of a culture in which truth has become relativized. Brian Williams's Truth Problem, and Ours.

NINA SHEA: A new human-rights report exposes the Islamic State's horrific crimes. Fight ISIS on the Ideas Front, Too.

JAMES LILEKS: All dissent from leftist orthodoxy is based on irrational "phobias" that must be rooted out. Disagreement as Mental Illness.

SLIDESHOW: Pentagon Budget.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

February 12, 2015

Oregon, Enjoying the Most Dramatic Politics in the Country at This Moment

Monday's Jolt began with the news that Oregon governor John Kitzhaber might be on his way out.

Keep watching:

Gov. John Kitzhaber decided to resign Tuesday but then changed his mind, insisting Wednesday afternoon that he's staying, The Oregonian/OregonLive has learned.

Events developed as the Democratic governor, now in a historic fourth term and fighting multiple investigations, faced eroding support from other elected officials and even his own advisers.

The governor decided to pull back from resigning -- set for Thursday or Friday -- after meeting with his attorney, Portland lawyer Jim McDermott, and his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes.

Relax, Everybody, Putin Says We Can Trust Him

Peace in our time!

The leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany on Thursday announced a comprehensive peace deal for eastern Ukraine, but questions remained whether Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists have agreed on all of its terms.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said the agreement envisages a cease-fire starting Sunday, following marathon peace talks in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, but Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the talks did not include any agreement on autonomy for the rebel-held areas in the region.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, Poroshenko and Putin began talks on Wednesday in an effort to hash out a peace agreement between Kiev and the separatists amid a spike in fighting.

Putin announced that agreements had been signed, one declaring the cease-fire, the other to implement it, after 17 hours of talks. He said that he and Poroshenko disagreed on assessing the situation in a key flashpoint.

Putin said "it was not the best night in my life but the morning, I think, it is good because we have managed to agree on the main things despite all the difficulties of the negotiations."

Am I cynical for wondering if the ceasefire will last as long as the negotiations did?

Jon Stewart, the Comfortable President of the Counter-Establishment

I hope you caught yesterday's late-afternoon assessment of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. Forgive me for wanting to put some sand in the gears of an upcoming media-world farewell tour for Stewart, but for a program that allegedly represented the most influential, important, and consequential voice of satire in modern American life, it spent a lot of time punching down at targets way less powerful than it was. The creative team undoubtedly thought of themselves as plucky underdogs tweaking the nose of self-important powerful figures abusing their power from the heights of American life. But they sure didn't mind descending on small towns with a camera crew, making no-name school-board members or mayors look foolish on national television, for the crime of expressing a view the producers found laughable.

Dave Weigel makes some good points, too:

This granted Stewart more power than any comparable host. Everyone covered the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov. No one captured the liberal horror at the rollout like Stewart did, when he interviewed then-HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "If you're a Democrat and you've lost Jon Stewart, you have a problem," intoned Chuck Todd and the other authors of NBC News's First Read memo. But that was just it: The assumption was that Stewart would only nail Democrats when they were halfway down the tubes already. The rest of the time, he'd be mocking conservatives, and the worst of the mainstream media; liberals would get dopamine hits from watching the results on TPM or HuffPost.

During the long and torturous removal of David Gregory from Meet the Press, NBC News met with Stewart about hosting the show. "They were exploring it in the way of, 'Maybe it's time to do something ridiculous,'" Stewart told Chris Smith in a 2014 interview. "There was definitely a meeting. I spent most of it telling them what a crazy idea I thought it was and kind of going through all of the different reasons why I did not think it was appropriate either for me or for them. That venue feels like an Establishment vehicle. They run on access. There's a certain symbiosis with politicians. I am a part of an Establishment but in a slightly different element."

That was one definition of "Establishment." For a very long time, Stewart represented a permanent and oddly comfortable Counter-Establishment—a beachhead where liberals could be confident that they were right and conservatives were stupid. The worst of cable news was blended in a montage that Stewart could make fun of. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell could be mocked with jokes about turtles; South Carolina Lindsey Graham could be mocked in a Southern belle accent. This defined political news for a generation of liberal Americans, but even Stewart seemed to be finding it stale.

Mark Ambinder reminds us, "Around 2.5 million Americans per night watch The Daily Show. More than nine million tune in to NBC Nightly News. The influence of the people who watch the show is greater than the show's influence itself."

Brian Williams, Offering the Least Valorous Tale of Stolen Valor

Apparently NBC strongly considered firing Brian Williams -- and his bosses have found other instances of "exaggeration."

A friendly reader writes in:

Frankly, where Brian Williams is concerned, you are right on one account. Things he does simply to satisfy or build his ego are irrelevant. It doesn't matter.

The problem here is that these "tall tales" he was telling don't exist in a vacuum. In this case he was appropriating for himself heroism demonstrated by members of our military. This is Stolen Valor. In fact, what he did was worse than the punks that pretend to have earned the right to wear the uniform of any of the armed services, much less the medals they adorn themselves with. At least the extent of their lie is limited to the people unfortunate enough to have come in personal contact with them. So while the nature of what he did is comparable, the scale of his lie is greater than all of them.

I'm going to agree in part and disagree in part. I'm going to agree that the scale of this matters. A national news anchor telling tales of things that didn't happen on the Nightly News, or The Late Show with David Letterman, or some other large, credulous audience is a much bigger deal than some guy at the end of the bar telling implausible tales of how he saw some serious trouble "in the sandbox." This is why this has been national news for a week.

I'm not quite convinced that Williams's sins rank up there with other acts characterized as "Stolen Valor" -- when veterans and active-duty troops spot people they believe are faking military service, confront them on video, and then post the results on social media.

For all of his flaws, Williams isn't claiming any personal bravery or heroism, or suggesting that his actions did anything to save the helicopter. In the version of the story we've seen so far, Williams pretends he's just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and spared any serious consequence because of the braver men around him. (It's a strangely modest fantasy; for a tale that represents stolen valor, he doesn't describe himself demonstrating any actual valor.)

By the way, going to Iraq, as a journalist, during wartime, is a pretty brave thing to do. Not as brave as wearing our country's uniform, but it does involve temporarily traveling and living with a certain amount of risk.

The guys who claim to have served but didn't, or who wear medals they didn't earn, strike me as a bigger deal -- but I'm willing to leave the judgment about the gravity of the wrongdoing to veterans, who are best-positioned to make that assessment.

ADDENDA: Life's little surprises:

Comedienne Rosanne Barr has been an increasingly vocal of defender of Israel in Hollywood. So, whatever you think of her past work, give her an "attagirl."

. . . The Keystone Pipeline bill is on its way to the president's desk . . . for a veto.

. . . I'm scheduled to appear on the panel for On the Record with Greta Van Susteren this evening.

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