New Yorker Editor David Remnick Eulogizes Jon Stewart, 'Invaluable Patriot'

August 3rd, 2015 1:19 PM

It’s going to be a fawning and funereal week for liberals, all competing with each other to see who can offer the most overripe eulogy for Jon Stewart. New Yorker editor David Remnick called Stewart an “invaluable patriot” because he took on what novelist Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk.”  That must be the crackpot equivalent of American exceptionalism.

Stewart set out to be a working comedian, and he ended up an invaluable patriot. But the berserk never stops. His successor, Trevor Noah, will not lack for material. As Stewart put it wryly on one of his last nights on the air, “As I wind down my time here, I leave this show knowing that most of the world’s problems have been solved by us, The Daily Show. But sadly there are still some dark corners that our broom of justice has not reached yet."

Remnick at least acknowledged Stewart the Broom of Justice was conventionally liberal, for the most part, despite protests to the contrary: 

There was always something a little disingenuous about Stewart’s insistence that he is a centrist, free of ideological commitment to anything except truth and sanity. In fact, his politics tend to lean left of center. He’s been aggressive toward, and ruthlessly funny about, unsurprising targets from Donald Rumsfeld to Wall Street. His support for L.G.B.T. rights, civil rights, voting rights, and women’s rights has always been unambiguous. His critique of Obama is generally that of the somewhat disappointed liberal, particularly on issues like Guantánamo and drones. But Stewart is a centrist only in this sense: he is not so much pro-left as he is anti-bulls--t.

Let’s repeat: Stewart tolerated all sorts of unchallenged liberal arguments from liberals on his show with a minmum of calling “BS” on them. Like Hank Stuever at The Washington Post (and Chris Matthews ad infinitum), Remnick turned to the “clown car” analogy for GOP presidential candidates: 

Four nights a week for sixteen years, Jon Stewart, the host and impresario of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, has taken to the air to expose our civic bizarreries. He has been heroic and persistent. Blasted into orbit by a trumped-up (if you will) impeachment and a stolen Presidential election, and then rocketing through the war in Iraq and right up to the current electoral circus, with its commodious clown car teeming with would-be Commanders-in-Chief, Stewart has lasered away the layers of hypocrisy in politics and in the media....

Stewart soon found his footing, and what he became, with the help of his writers, his co-stars, and a tirelessly acute research team, was the best seriocomic reader of the press since A. J. Liebling laid waste to media barons like William Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert R. McCormick. Stewart demonstrated that many of the tropes favored by the yellow press of Liebling’s day have only grown stronger. “There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor,” Liebling wrote. The contempt that he found in the plutocrat-owned, proletarian-read press, Stewart found on Fox News—particularly in ersatz journalists like Stuart Varney, a sneery character out of Dickens who regularly goes on about “these so-called poor people” who “have things” but “what they lack is the richness of spirit.” Stewart’s evisceration of Varney was typically swift and unforgiving.

No one will call BS on Jon “I make $30 million a year” Stewart posing as the guardian of the poor. Perhaps he can set up a chain of homeless shelters with his lucrative comedy.