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2 of 3 Premium Clicks used this month SUBSCRIBE Print + Online Subscriber Activation | Register x Forgot Password | Need an Account? subscribe | newsletter | deals Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » NEWS NOW Smoke blankets Rogue Valley as Stouts fire grows to 8,500 acres ... Herb Rothschild Jr.: Missing Jon Stewart ... Ticket Availability ... Smoke blankets Rogue Valley as Stouts fire grows to 8,500 acres ... Herb Rothschild Jr.: Missing Jon Stewart ... Ticket Availability ... RELOCATIONS Herb Rothschild Jr.: Missing Jon Stewart Comment DailyTidings.com Writer Posted Aug. 1, 2015 at 12:01 AM Posted Aug. 1, 2015 at 12:01 AM » Social News This coming week will be Jon Stewart’s last on The Daily Show. We’ll miss what only he can bring to the show, but let’s hope that, with Trevor Noah as its host, it won’t lose Stewart’s intellectual integrity. Yes, we’ve enjoyed his humor. And yes, his fans have enjoyed his progressive viewpoint. But for me neither his comic abilities nor his politics have been the driving force of the show. It’s been his disgust with people’s willingness to say just anything, no matter how untrue or self-contradictory, to promote their views. Fox News has been Stewart’s most frequent target, and understandably so, but not primarily because they occupy widely separated positions on the political spectrum. Stewart doesn’t quarrel with the opinions of Bill O’Reilly and company. He uses clips from their shows to let them expose themselves as the self-serving charlatans they are. Had the essence of The Daily Show been satire of right-wing politics, the end of the George W. Bush era might have been fatal to its quality. Indeed, when Obama was elected, some wondered how the show would fare without the low-hanging fruit of Bush’s vacuous behavior and his inner circle’s stupid viciousness to feed on. But because the primary target of Stewart’s satire has been egregious lack of integrity, there’s been no dearth of food, Republican or Democrat. One example of his own integrity was his treatment of John McCain. They’ve had a long relationship marked by personal cordiality. Stewart admired McCain for standing up to his own party’s positions on several key matters, including campaign finance reform and torture of detainees. But when McCain insisted, for electoral advantage, first that he was a “maverick” and later that he never had been a maverick, Stewart came down hard on him. For the rest of this column I’ll speak of Stewart’s handling of an issue that has been an ongoing focus of Peace House — namely, preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons through diplomacy rather than military action. Near the end of 2014 there was an effort in Congress, impelled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to derail the diplomatic process by imposing even harsher economic sanctions on Iran than are extant. Stewart showed clips of members of Congress saying at an earlier time that sanctions were needed to bring Iran to the bargaining table. Since the sanctions had achieved that goal, those same people now had to concoct different rationales for increasing, not loosening them. The self-contradiction was stark, and I remember the disgust in Stewart’s voice when that segment ended and he went to the break. The agreement between Iran and the world’s major powers was reached this month, and predictably Netanyahu insists that it will be a disaster for Israel, with Republicans and some Democrats dutifully following his lead. Stewart showed a clip of Netanyahu warning Israelis last year that Iran would have a nuclear-weapons capacity in a matter of months. He followed it with a clip of Netanyahu now warning that the agreement will allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons in 10 years. Stewart hardly commented. The clips spoke for themselves. One need only listen to the Republican presidential aspirants, including Scott Walker’s shocking pledge to declare war on Iran his first day in office, to know how much we’ll miss Jon Stewart. He hasn’t been a left-wing political pundit. Like all fine satirists, he’s been a champion of honesty and a scourge of cant. Herb Rothschild Jr. is chairman of the board of Peace House.                 DailyTidings.com Writer Posted Aug. 1, 2015 at 12:01 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. 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