Tuesday, March 18, 2025

...Even The Police Began To Sit Up And Take Notice.

 



Some professional journalism types are just now starting to play catch-up, bless their hearts.

To demonstrate this phenomenon, we first have to do some of that No Fair Remembering Stuff.

This is an excerpt from WHYY Boston's PBS station, from December of 2014.  And it is recounting events going back to 2001 and 2002:

But the thing is, Dick Cheney always Knows. 
 
His brand is blind certitude – “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” “We will in fact be greeted as liberators,” and the rest of his greatest hits – yet Meet the Press continues to indulge him. Which brings me to yesterday’s most groan-worthy moment.

At one point, host Chuck Todd asked Cheney whether he has any regrets about toppling Saddam Hussein. Cheney naturally said no, because Hussein “had previously had twice nuclear programs going. He produced and used weapons of mass destruction. And he had a ten-year relationship with Al Qaeda.” (Italics are mine.)

For more than a decade on Meet the Press, Cheney has been peddling variations of that lie – the lie that Hussein plotted 9/11 with Al Qaeda – in order to justify the ruinous invasion of Iraq. And he’s still doing it. And his hosts are still letting him get away with it.

Most notoriously, in December 2001 and in September 2002, Cheney said on the show that it was “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with a Saddam secret agent “several months before the attack.” Actually, it had not been confirmed. As the bipartisan 9/11 Commission reported in 2004, the Atta-Hussein connection had been nothing more than a rumor.

The 9/11 Commission said that Al Qaeda and the Hussein regime had occasionally communicated over the years, but “we have seen no evidence that these contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen any evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Three years later, in 2007, a report by the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command reached the same conclusion. There was ” no ‘smoking gun’ between Saddam’s Iraq and Al Qaeda,” the defense analysts wrote, because Saddam and Al Qaeda didn’t trust each other. “To the fundamentalist leadership of Al Qaeda, Saddam represented the worst kind of  ‘apostate’ regime. A secular police state well practiced in suppressing internal challenges.”

If a “liberal” media outpost like Meet the Press persists in putting Cheney on the air, the least it should do is fact-check him by quoting the 9/11 Commission and the Pentagon report. Giving him free rein to lie yet again – in support of a long-discredited war rationale – is arguably far worse than giving him the mic to make the case for torture.

Put a pin in the these statements: "'liberal' media outpost like Meet the Press" and "the least it should do is fact-check him".  A big pin.

Early on it came to be known to anyone who was paying attention that the venerable Meet the Press was, in fact, Dick Cheney's favorite place to put his lies into the public record because they never pushed back.  

From The LA Times, February 12, 2007:

Those of us who get a kick out of watching Tim Russert every Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” are feeling a little hangdog these days. We always thought Big Russ Jr. was tough on the powerful. Now we learn that to some Washington media types on both the right and the left, he’s just a tool for the powerful.

What’s occasioned this perceptual turnabout is, of course, the perjury and obstruction trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, where Russert wrapped up two days of testimony last week. Libby says the NBC newsman fed him the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, who is at the center of the trial. Russert says he didn’t.

To ordinary viewers, though, whatever transpired during Libby’s phone call to Russert back in 2003 couldn’t be as jarring as what the trial has unearthed about Washington’s deeply cynical attitude toward “Meet the Press,” a venerable, 60-year-old staple of network TV and the No. 1-rated Sunday news talk show.

A former Cheney press aide testified last month that she pushed to get the vice president on Russert’s show to bat down negative news because it was “our best format,” a program where political handlers can “control the message.”

We now rejoin the present-day, already in progress...

This is from Margaret Sullivan who, some of you may know, is the former media columnist for The Washington Post, and the fifth public editor of The New York Times and the first woman to hold the position. In that role, she reported directly to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. as the "readers' representative".

From her newsletter yesterday.

As Donald Trump continued his chaotic and destructive march through a second term, the New York Times had a few choice words for what he’s doing, as they promoted an audio offering.

Ready?

“Trump’s New Charm Offensive.” I posted the full headline on social media, asking “Really, NYT?” and one respondent said she was so upset when she saw it earlier that day, she canceled her subscription over it.

That seems extreme since the Times has done a lot of very good reporting in recent weeks. But the headline does seem quite unhinged from reality, and it makes me wonder why no one stopped to question or change it. It represents the soft-focus presentation we see all too often that may well be an intentional business strategy on the part of the Times — everybody invited in to the big tent.

Here’s another over a David Sanger piece about how Trump’s policies supposedly would restore America’s manufacturing economy. (Sanger is excellent and deeply experienced, and the piece itself — mostly about Trump’s tariffs — is well reported.) The headline: “Trump’s Big Bet: Americans Will Tolerate Economic Downturn to Restore Manufacturing.”

As one Times reader aptly commented: “The headline here is misleading — none of Trump’s current policies will do anything to bring back manufacturing (quite the opposite) so treating Trump’s hypothesis as even remotely plausible is a massive disservice.” Here’s a gift version of the article; judge for yourself, and do scan the scathing comments.

Why does The Times too often normalize Trump like this, even now? Readers, your thoughts? Let me know. I have some theories, hinted at above and probably to be further developed in a separate post.

Ms. Sullivan was a journalist at the Post and the Times for decades, as well as the the public editor at the Times, which gave her daily one-on-one contact with the Times' publisher, so why in the name of Breslin and Royko is she asking her readers for their "thoughts" on the motives behind the Times' publishing this drivel?  

How the fuck would they know?  Also, Liberal bloggers have already spent more than 20 year theorizing why the Times and the rest of the legacy media are so addicted to Both Siderist bullshit, and are so prone to going soft and belly-up when confronted with belligerent Republican fuckery,

So instead coyly trying to crowdsource speculation about a question to which, as a former member of the Times' inner circle, you should damn well already know, why don't you tell us in plain, clear language why Sulzberger is doing this?  Or engage in that, y'know, journalism thing and do what none of the rest of us have the standing to pull off: call Sulzberger directly and ask him?

Meanwhile, over in the March 6, 2025 edition of The Contrarian, former CNN employee Josh Levs says "fact checks" are too little too late: "What we need in America is a truth countermovement." 

Why all those Trump fact checks are too little too late

Many Americans distrust the media, largely because false claims have gone unchallenged for so long.

In the latest episode of my podcast They Stand Corrected, which fact checks the news, I looked at the Sunday political talk shows. By the time I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I found more uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single episode. 

First, put another pin in this sentence: "By the time I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I found more uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single episode."  Another big pin.  We shall revisit it later.  

Second, wowzers!  

You mean the crown jewels of American political reportage were riddled with uncorrected lies?  

Tell me more!

For example, on a recent Meet the Press, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said, “What Oklahomans want is to make sure that we get rid of the waste and fraud inside the federal government. And that's exactly what the president has done. They've already identified billions, billions of dollars of waste and fraud for the taxpayers.”

Host Kristen Welker mentioned that “they haven't provided proof of fraud.” But Mullin’s claim about all that alleged “waste” went uncorrected, even as he repeated it. “Within only four short weeks, we've already identified over fifty-five billion dollars of waste and fraud,” he insisted. That's not true. At the time of the interview, there was already proof that “DOGE,” the Department of Government Efficiency, had no clue what it was doing. Viewers wouldn’t know this.

Mullin was also asked about protests across the country and in his home state. “The chair of the DNC, Ken Martin, openly admitted on MSNBC just yesterday that they were manufacturing these protests,” he insisted. “They were bussing in armies to manufacture these protests.” None of this is true. But NBC’s Meet the Press let that claim go.

Meanwhile, CBS’ Face the Nation interviewed Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Trump’s request. “We've had, you know, close to a million-and-a-half deaths” in the Ukraine war, he claimed. No. Trump and his team have thrown around figures like that, but none of the figures available about Russia’s war on Ukraine shows casualty counts anywhere near that high. But no one watching that interview would know.

When I bring up this problem to news executives, they often respond with some version of, “Well, it's live. How are we supposed to fact check everything?” That's faulty thinking. Who says all this has to be live? What if news agencies—shocking idea—pre-recorded interviews and only aired them with fact checks?

And the solution?

What we need in America is a truth countermovement: a national demand for the media to cut through disinformation and deliver only the truth, always.

Until then, Americans will all too often be left freezing in a blizzard, drenched by a firehose, or under fire amid a blitzkrieg. And unscrupulous leaders will continue to wreak havoc through shameless lying.

I must now reveal a terrible truth about myself.  For the better part of two decades I ran a feature on my little blog out here in the middle of Middle America called "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" or "Sunday's Mouse Circus"  or "Voice of Empire".  I got bored every few years and changed the name.  

Anyway, every Sunday I wrote out a long deconstruction of most of the network Sunday Shows.  I started doing this back at Castle Driftglass in Chicago, before I had cable or any "Pause" or "Rewind" capacity.  This was before YouTube had video clips up for reference (Hell, practically before YouTube existed) and before transcripts were readily available.  

I watched as many as I could manage, live, on over-the-air broadcast teevee, remote in-hand, clicking back and forth between them all, or as many as I could stand, and transcribing as fast as I could, or at least extracting the gist and presenting it in my own, uh, style.

Here's a sample.  From me in January of 2006.  And, yes, that's 19 years ago...

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Through an ass darkly…”

Wherein the GOP demonstrate their “Pre-1776” mindset.

Two quick-and-dirty highlights right up front that had me worried about my mental health.

Consider…

On Fox….in his ongoing fit of “Everybody Does It!”, Dirty-Jack was-a-bipartisan-pimp compulsive onanism, Chris Wallace frantically Abramoff’s himself all over his guest’s clean, Progressive suit, followed by an interview a coupla “Young Guns of the GOP”.

(Last week it was three Republican “reformers” that had squeegeed enough Dirty Jack Wank off their faces for us to see their lyin’ eyes and, forming a Papa, Mama and Baby Bear GOP Denial Kickline, managed to force their mouths to say the words “GOP Reformers” without that chemical cocktail that supersized The Joker’s pie-hole in “Batman”.

The contest, last week and this, is now how far and how fast can you distance yourself from Abramoff, and how many times can you repeat a variation of the phrase “bipartisan scandal”.

Abramoff? Never met the man.

Jack Abramoff? Never heard of him.

Lifelong-GOP-powerbroke-and-my-son’s-godfather, Jack Abramoff??? Why, he doesn’t even really exist. He’s just a Neocon Kaiser Soze we dreamed up; a myth to scare little Republicans.

As twas prophesied, they shall deny him three times before the cock crows. And Andy Sullivan wasn’t even on the Matthews’ Show this week.)

And then, on NBC – this week as last -- Chris Matthews doodles “George + Chris 4ever!!!” all over his Sunday Morning spiral-notebook, and openly pines and sighs for his Strong Man President to Rhett Butler him up the stairs, into the Lincoln Bedroom, for some rough, fascist sex that will finally make a real woman out of him...

FYI, the post goes on and on, covering most of the Sunday Shows.  For context, at this point George W. Bush's little over-by-Christmas Iraqi adventure was a full-on clusterfuck and now everyone could see it.  Which made all the usual Conservative pundits (who has spent the last few years giddily shitting all over us Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving Liberals on these very same shows) very uncomfortable.  

Here, preserved in the digital amber of my blog archives, was just such a moment on "This Week...".  From the same January, 2006 post.

[George] Will unpacks his wee soapbox, clambers atop it, and says, sure, we can bomb the crap out of Iran and knock it back ten years or so.

But, Will asks, “Then what?”

“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask bef…”

And in that perfect little jewel of a moment you could positively smell Karl Rove tickling the joystick that controls the high-voltage, barbed wire cock-ring that the GOP keeps wrapped around the withered sac of its pet journalists.

George unwrapped his lips from around the words he was just about to say like a man stung in the gums by a wasp the size of an Escalade. He then quickly shifted gears and began nattering on about Admiral Yamamoto telling the Japanese high command that, sure, he could attack the U.S. fleet and run wild in the Pacific for a “year and a day.”

…but “Then What?”

Of course the statement Will was verging on making before Karl the Klown jolted him back to goodthinkfulness was this:

“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask…before we invaded Iraq.”

But of course, that’s kind of a sore subject; one that the Stalinist Right has striven mightily to stomp down the ol’ Memory Hole and piss away into the mists of forgotten myth and lore.

Because, of course, people did ask that question before Dubya rolled our children into Iraq to be slaughtered behind his PNAC fantasies and petroleum dream, didn’t they George?

Millions and millions and millions of people asked that very question.

Very Loudly.

They were called Democrats, George.

And your Party called them unAmerican, remember George?

And even the Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq –- and there were many of them -- made it very clear that they were not giving your President a blank check.

The Dem’s made it abundantly clear that there needed to be concrete, convincing evidence of an imminent threat. Evidence of WMDs delivered by inspectors on the ground. Evidence of some linkage to 9/11.

They demanded that enough troops be used to get the job done. And they insisted on a clear exit strategy.

And your President mumbled, “Yeah…Ok…whatever”, blew off every warning and caution, grabbed the keys to the car and drove it right off the fucking cliff, didn't he George?

And the Democrats who had made the epic mistake of trusting a dim little creep like George Bush to behave responsibly with the national Credit Card?

Your Party called them weak and cowardly, remember George?

Funny how you seem the effortlessly remember, oh, say, every stray stat surrounding Cal Koonce’s ERA, but can’t seem to remember these rather vitally important, life-and-death facts about your Party and President, isn’t is George?...

Once again, back in present day, someone needs to tell former CNN employee Josh Levs that my stuff is not unique.  A lot of other Liberal bloggers and podcasters were doing this too, and some still are.  We didn't just "[piece] through the transcript for just one of those shows" one time: collectively we deconstructed all of the shows, every Sunday, for decades.

And you know what, Josh?  It didn't make the slightest difference.  In fact, all of those shows just kept getting exponentially worse.  

So Josh, when you say "What we need in America is a truth countermovement." I don't know whether to laugh or cry or simply reply,  you mean like... Liberal bloggers and podcasters?

Because we're already out here, Josh, promiscuously violating the legacy media rules about not remembering inconvenient things every day,

And we've been doing it for decades.



I Am The Liberal Media


Monday, March 17, 2025

Cuck Schumer

"You were given the choice between war and dishonour.  You chose dishonor, and you will have war" -- Winston Churchill.

In February of 2021, seven Republican senators crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats to impeach Donald Trump for the second time:

7 GOP Senators Voted To Convict Trump. Only 1 Faces Voters Next Year

That vote failed to meet the 2/3rds majority threshold which would have removed Trump from office, barred him from holding any future office and spared us all the nightmare we are living through now. Because, despite giving as good an imitation of an impassioned speech as an empty husk with a dead soul can give, in the end then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to take the coward's way out when he refused to vote for impeachment, and refused to whip his caucus for enough votes to impeach.  

In private, of course, Republican leadership knew full well what kind of monster they had on their hands.  But after a minute or two of virtue signaling, they collapsed back into the cowardice/cynicism crouch which has defined the modern Republican party.  

‘I’ve Had It With This Guy’: G.O.P. Leaders Privately Blasted Trump After Jan. 6

In the days after the attack, Representative Kevin McCarthy planned to tell Mr. Trump to resign. Senator Mitch McConnell told allies impeachment was warranted. But their fury faded fast.

The confidential expressions of outrage from Mr. McCarthy and Mr. McConnell, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the immense gulf between what Republican leaders say privately about Mr. Trump and their public deference to a man whose hold on the party has gone virtually unchallenged for half a decade.

The leaders’ swift retreat in January 2021 represented a capitulation at a moment of extraordinary political weakness for Mr. Trump — perhaps the last and best chance for mainstream Republicans to reclaim control of their party from a leader who had stoked an insurrection against American democracy itself.

Instead McConnell took the time-tested approach of ignoring the problem and hoping it would just go away on its own.

‘Unchecked’ book excerpt: Inside McConnell’s decision not to convict Trump

“Let’s just ignore him,” the GOP Senate leader said at one point, underscoring his hands-off approach on whether to stand up to pro-Trump lawmakers after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol

And if ignoring the monster they created didn't work, well, who ya gonna call when Republicans fuck things up and don't have the moral character to fix what they have broken?

“The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to the imminent impeachment vote in the House.

And now, by a darkly hilarious quirk of history, seven is also the number of Democratic senators (well, six and one Independent) who, instead of crossing the aisle to stand up to Trump, have crossed the aisle to join with 100% of Republican senators to invest Trump with virtually dictatorial powers ... sign Washington D.C.'s death warrant ... a list of other horribles

For future reference, the senators who sold us out and sold out their House colleagues who voted the right way are John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, my very own senator Dick Durbin of Illinois to his everlasting shame, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Gary Peters of Michigan, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York,  Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and  Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats.

And the leader of this cadre of weaklings and sell swords was, as you also already know, Senate Minority Leader, Cuck Schumer.

Schumer is a creature shaped by the ancient mores and folkways of a Beltway culture which no longer exists and which, by all rights, should have died when they put old David Broder in the ground.  The culture of High Borderism in which it was acceptable for Republicans to lie and sabotage with, as Steve Benen wrote back in 2009 "no apparent interest in being a credible governing partner, and no intention to negotiate honestly", but it was unpardonably rude -- perhaps even a fainting offense -- for Democrats to point this out.

As I wrote of David Fucking Brooks a short time ago, even though, just like the rest of us, Schumer has had his nose repeatedly rubbed in the fact that the old gods are dead, unlike the rest of us, Schumer is still paying obeisance to this long-dead god in a temple which has long since fallen to rubble.  

Schumer is a creature of back-slapping, backroom deal-making, where there is always a shitty "bipartisan" compromise to be found somewhere.  He is one of the last of a species that is going extinct, but that doesn't realize they are already doomed.  Who doesn't know how to function in a world where Trump is possible, and where all his friends on the Right have either retired, died or gone full fascist, but who are equally incapable of understanding that it is long past time to step aside and let the new people fight this new fight. 

And the thing is, above almost anyone else, Schumer should fucking well know better.

As I write this we are just days away from the 22nd anniversary of George W. Bush's Iraqi Clusterfuck.  His ill-conceived war of conquest, launched on March 20, 2003 on the basis of a farrago of lies, and which ended up being the greatest American military debacle since Vietnam.  But Bush's Iraqi Clusterfuck would never have gotten out of the gate without the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution.

And the day after the House passed the AUMF, the Senate followed suit, and by a vote of  77–23 gave Bush their official OK to go forth and conquer. And one of the 29 Democrats who voted to give Bush permission to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do was Schumer.  

Of course, a lot of Dems made the same mistake, including John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.  In fact, it's fair to say that had Barack Obama not been able to point to the position he publicly took against the war --


-- Hillary Clinton may well have been the party's 2008 nominee.  And had Obama not "blessed" Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton by making them his Vice President and Secretary of State respectively, it's quite possible that neither one of them could have overcome the stigma of their vote enough to win the party's nominations for president. 

However, today that's not the point.  Today we ask the question, "What should Schumer have learned from the last time he voted to hand a lying and dangerously incompetent Republican president a blank check?"

And thanks to his own public comments, we have the answer to that question.  From the AP:

Twenty years on, reflection and regret on 2002 Iraq war vote

... Another “yes” vote on the Senate floor that night was New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader. With the vote coming a year after Sept. 11 devastated his hometown, he says he believed then that the president deserved the benefit of the doubt when a nation is under attack.

“Of course, with the luxury of hindsight, it’s clear that the president bungled the war from start to finish and should not have ever been given that benefit,” Schumer said in a statement. “Now, with the war firmly behind us, we’re one step closer to putting the war powers back where they belong — in the hands of Congress.”

With the luxury of hindsight of Trump's first term and everything he has said and done since then, it is 100% obvious to anyone with a pulse and a conscience that he should never, ever have been given the kinds of powers embedded in the CR.  

So, what did Cuck Schumer get in exchange for selling out his party and his country?

He earned himself the most bankrupt currency in politics: a handful of "Good Doggie" points from Grandpa Syphilis -- 

-- just days after Grandpa Syphilis said this about him:

Trump has decided that Chuck Schumer is ‘not Jewish anymore’

The American presidency is a powerful position, but it does not include the power to decide who is and is not Jewish.

And he appears to have succeeded in getting huge swath of the fractious and demoralized Democrat base to unite around a single issue:  Getting Cuck Schumer the fuck out of Senate leadership.  

 




Saturday, March 15, 2025

Il Douche Defiles The Memory of Fallen Soldiers. Again.

From Task & Purpose:

Arlington Cemetery website drops links for Black, Hispanic, and women veterans

The website for Arlington National Cemetery "unpublished" links to lists of notable graves, walking tours and educational material pertaining to Black, Hispanic and women veterans, as well as some Medal of Honor recipients.

Far too many otherwise intelligent people continue to be shocked when the America fascist party takes another depraved leap into darkness.  

Stop it.

The key to understanding American Conservatives is to never underestimate how deeply they hate this country.

Period.  Full stop.


No Half Measures


Thursday, March 13, 2025

Professional Left Podcast Episode 883: The Media's Favorite Drug


"A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority."  -- Booker T. Washington.


Links:  

The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!













Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Centrism's back baby! And Michael Steele's Got It!

Now that the MSNBC/Bulwark axis has completed the rehabilitation of Michael Steele and, after MSNBC race purge, given him one-third of his own weekday show, Steele is now firmly a member in good standing of that inner circle of recently-former Republicans who will control the direction of the last little corner of the "liberal" media on cable teevee.

And in his ad on The Bulwark for his own podcast, Steele gives us a hint about who he thinks the "liberal" media should be leaning towards:

Politics.  Culture.  You name it, we're talkin' about it.  And we're keeping 100% real right here on the Michael Steele podcast.  I'm Michael Steele.  I'm the host of the podcast. Each week I'm having conversations with political analysists, writers and activists who aren't afraid to shake things up.  A little bit like yours truly.  It doesn't matter if you're on the Left, the Right or somewhere in that strong Middle, this is the space you wanna be in...  

If I had to guess, as a complete outsider with no network contacts at all, but with a pretty good track record of making these sorts of predictions, I would guess this gives us a preview of where MSNBC is headed in the near future.  

Fact is, MSNBC is dying.  We'll, truth be told, cable news as a whole is dying, but MSNBC is leading the race to the cemetery.

From The Independent, December 18, 2024:

More bad news for MSNBC as they hemorrhage viewers and are now losing to NewsNation in weekend ratings battle

Amid plummeting ratings since Donald Trump’s election last month, several of the liberal cable news network’s programs on Saturday finished behind the centrist cable news upstart in the key 25-54 demographic.

From (so sorry) The New York Post, February 26, 2025:

‘Fox & Friends’ extends ratings lead as MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ loses nearly half its audience since election.

Thanks to a long series of stupid mistakes made by the network's stupid shot-callers, MSNBC has put itself in an impossible position.  

They don't want to lose whatever is left of their Liberal audience...

But they also refuse to sack Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough and his side piece and his menagerie of hacks, which is one of the major reasons liberals are staying away in droves...

Which means they very much need to attract replacement viewers so their ad rates don't drop to the point where only dick pill and prepper survival pack purveyors are willing to spend coin on advertising on MSNBC, because then it's back to six hours of LOCKDOWN! in the evenings...

But the chances of attracting any MAGA Republican viewers are slim to none, unless they pull a Newsome and start stunt-casting MAGA mopes like Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens.  Which will definitely drive away even more of their liberal viewers, because if I want to watch that trainwreck, I'll just wait until someone posts it on YouTube...

So, sooner or later,  the cable new shot-callers will once again begin listening to the siren's song of the same old snake oil salesmen peddling the same old nonsense about there being a vast and underserved audience of politically active and aware Centrists out there just over the horizon.  

And if the shot-callers just had the courage to lard their lineups with Third Way/No Labels/Country Over Party/Purple Project/Forward Party talking-heads, by jiminy, they could not only put on the best show this hick town has ever seen, but save the family farm to boot!


And that is where I believe MSNBC is headed.  

And it is for circumstances just such as this that, in the early 1600s the writer M. Day coined the expression "a fool's errand".


I Am The Liberal Media


Somehow, Schmidt Returned


I am struggling to remain in Jim Acosta's corner, but the man is making it difficult.  For example, this is what he pooped into my email inbox yesterday.


Steve Schmidt?  

Really?  

The guy who had torched his own career and stabbed his supporters in the back often enough that even I once thought he had finally, irrevocably used up the last of his Rolodex friends and cast himself out of The Club?    Burned enough bridges so that such as this could never happen again?  From Steve Schmidt: The Only Surprise Is That Anyone Is Surprised

...So how does Schmidt do it?  Continue to be trusted as a credible ally despite practically screaming that he isn't?

Because, to slightly misquote Ned Beatty in Network"He's on television dummy."  

In case you hadn't noticed, MSNBC has built an entire industry out of rehabilitating the reputations of Republican scoundrels, and all it takes for Schmidt to win his way back into the hearts of credulous Liberals is for Chris Hayes to officially welcome him back, or Joe Scarborough to put him back in the lineup, or Nicole Wallace to put her arm around her old pal Steve and reintroduce him to the audience as one of the good guys. 

Which is exactly what I predicted would happen during Schmidt's first fuck-my-principles cash grab back in February of 2019.

Thank you your Honor, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury.  I would say that I await your swift and just verdict, but I think we all know exactly what that verdict will be.  After taking Howard Schultz for every nickel he can, sooner rather than later Mr, Schmidt will be welcomed back into the loving and lucrative bosom of the Insider's Club.

Because, as I may have mentioned once or twice, the Insider's Club has only two rules:

There's a Club.

You are not in it.

And, right on time, it is exactly what happened eight months later.  

...


But of course, I was wrong.  Because the Legacy Media Insider Club is a house of many doors.  Many windows.  Many chimneys down which one can shimmy.   And many adjacent bungalows where marginal Club member can live and work until the are fully rehabilitated.

You and I aren't in the Club and never shall be because... we're not in it.  Seems like a tautology, right?  But it's the straight dope:  to be in the Club you have to have been in the Club.  

And although his membership card is torn and tarnished, I shall never again doubt that Schmidt is in the fucking Club.  Like the song says:

When you’re a Schmidt
You’re the top cat in town
You’re the gold-medal kid
With the heavyweight crown!
When you’re a Schmidt
You’re the swingin’est thing
Little boy, you’re a man;
Little man, you’re a king!

So, when given the chance to absorb some of Jim Acosta's rapidly fading Good Guy Ally glow, no surprise Schmidt took it.  

But wait!  There's more!

I don't know if you're aware, but now that Chuck Todd is free of the need to pretend he's not a complete tool by means of the rote recitation of the Both Sides Do It mantra every Sunday on Meet the Press, he is now venting his spleen with abandon to anyone who will listen.  

How curdled and bitter has Todd become?  So curdled and bitter that he scored himself this Fox News headline.  From March 3, 2025


Chuck Todd says the 'mythology' of Joe Biden as a family man is 'all bulls---' 
 
'What he really was, was a craven political animal that was desperate,' Chuck Todd said of 46th president

Former NBC "Meet the Press" anchor Chuck Todd delivered a brutal opinion about former President Biden, calling him a "craven political animal" who was more concerned about his political career than his own family.

But wait!  There's more!

As you know, Todd quit his NBC gig earlier this year, ending his time there as America's most famous Guy Sticking His Head In The Sand and America's leading Both Sides Do It propagandist, and leaving behind this hilariously clueless headline at Entertainment Weekly:

Chuck Todd exits NBC News, shares dissatisfaction with industry: 'The media has a lot of work to do'

"It's a bottom line here: we can't stick our heads in the sand and we can't be propagandists."

Stop laughing.  It's not polite.

So, no longer encumbered by his NBC contract, what toilet did Todd choose at which to take his vicious little shit on Joe Biden?

If you guessed the Steve Schmidt podcast, award yourself 10 points!

Here now, a more complete snip from the Fox News story, with emphasis added:

Former NBC "Meet the Press" anchor Chuck Todd delivered a brutal opinion about former President Biden, calling him a "craven political animal" who was more concerned about his political career than his own family.

During an appearance Sunday on Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt's "The Warning" podcast, Todd delved into why the Democrats lost the 2024 election and what he perceives as the media's relationship with the second Trump administration.

Acosta lending Schmidt his own, rapidly evaporating credibility.

Todd using Schmidt to take cheap shots at Biden, and scoring them both a feature at Fox News.

No one should be surprised that rehabilitation of Steve Schmidt is, once again, well underway. 

Because like road work on the Dan Ryan expressway, it never really stops.  


I Am The Liberal Media


Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Professional Left Podcast Episode 882: Twenty Plus Years of Asymmetry.


“History is a vast early warning system.” -- Norman Cousins


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