Gen. Peter Pace

Well, I didn’t know this, but Rivrdog informs us all that today is the birthday of the Marine Corps. Happy Birthday, USMC!

Thanks to the magic of my DVR, I sat down today over lunch to watch Monday’s excellent NewsHour interview with Gen. Peter Pace, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first Marine ever to be Joint Chiefs Chair. I came away with mixed feelings.

First off, I like the NewsHour! I’ve been watching it since I was a kid in the ’80s, and despite the standard PBS lefty slant, it was always more “fair and balanced” than any other news show out there, in that it’s an interview show more than a news program, and they always try to have a couple of different viewpoints represented. Most of the time they don’t include the viewpoint I’d espouse, but at least they’ve usually got broader coverage politically/ideologically than the pap on the networks.

(Not to get off on a tangent, but have you ever watched the BBC or ITN news? The reporters manage to cram more raw information per second into their spots than any American reporter I’ve ever seen. I may disagree with the importance or relevance of some of the information, but that’s real reporting! I wish Fox would adopt that give-’em-a-lot-of-data approach rather than the sensational stuff they seem to go for most of the time.)

Now in college, I found out rather quickly that the elite in America get their news from the NewsHour. If you’re a political junkie (I am) and want to know what the movers & shakers in DC will be thinking about tomorrow, you watch the NewsHour tonight. So what someone says on the NewsHour is far more important in terms of being able to discern/predict what policies will be coming down the pike than anything you see on any other news show.

Jim Lehrer, the anchor and co-creator of the show, got raked over the coals the last time he moderated a presidential debate for what folks on both sides of the aisle perceived as softball questions. He hasn’t done a whole lot of one-on-one interviews since then, and he came roaring out of the gate this time as if to make up for it. He hit Pace pretty hard, in his respectful way, but I’m happy to say that despite some initial shakiness, Pace did a great job.

I had mixed feelings because I was expecting (naively, I suppose) a more Chesty Puller / R. Lee Ermey type of person, someone who would have snapped Lehrer’s head off when he asked stupid liberal questions. Pace wasn’t like that at all. He was, however, firm and in command of the facts. Read the whole thing (linked above), it’s pretty good.