One-Trick Pony Knows One Trick: A Chuck Todd Adventure

I'll bet some of you thought Chuck Todd had gone away for good.  Perhap, (in keeping with the headline of this post) you surmised that he'd been shipped off to the career glue factory. Or maybe sent upstate to a disgraced former NBC anchor farm, there to play happily in the sun all day long with Tom Brokaw. Matt Lauer, Brian Williams and David Gregory.

Nope.

In addition to being given a participation-trophy streaming things called "NBC News NOW" as part of his please-go-away package from COMCAST, Todd also retained the title of Chief Political Analyst for NBC News.  Which means that, like a Beltway super-rat, chewing his way through concrete and fighting the mighty currents trying to sweep him into professional obsolescence, Todd will still, from time to time, claw his way out of obscurity, back up the Beltway sewer pipe, then pop unexpectedly out of the NBC News toilet with another staggeringly Chuck Toddian opinion.  

Like today.  From NBC News (with no link, because fuck that guy, but also with a h/t to alert reader @ragonkforce1 for sending this my way).

Chuck Todd: Our broken judiciary

Analysis: Court reform proposals wouldn’t deal with the core problem: too many judges wearing red and blue robes rather than black ones.

Do I even need to go on?  Because I'm betting you know exactly how this shitty article plays out, possibly down to the paragraph where the razor-in-the-apple will inevitably be found.  

It's paragraph six.  

Right after categorically dismissing Democrat's anger over the naked corruption and malice of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito as mere partisanship --

There’s no doubt this anger from the left over Thomas and, to a lesser extent, Justice Samuel Alito...

-- and the pausing just long enough to acknowledge that, well, yeah, Thomas and Alito are pretty fucking awful.  But we cannot tarry there, because the Both Sides Do It parade is about to begins!

From paragraph six:

But as much as ethical lapses are a problem, this isn’t why the judiciary appears broken to so many Americans. Remember, today’s judges are a product of our generation-long polarized wars of the Senate. The issue isn’t how judges behave in office; the issue appears to be the confirmation process itself.

The word "appears" is doing so much heaving lifting here I'm afraid it'll herniate several discs.  

Also Chuck Todd's pulled-out-of-thin-air assertion that somehow he knows the real reason "so many Americans"  think the judiciary is broken isn't because Republicans have been running a 50-year-long project to fuck the court up beyond repair is like a shot of vintage, triply-rectified David Brooks bullshittery circa 2010.

Then comes the parade.

If you are angry about the judiciary, remember whom to blame: the Senate leaders who hijacked the process...

Somewhere along the line, Senate leaders on both sides of the aisle...

And that rank partisanship may explain why the public’s views of the Supreme Court...

While senators love to blame the other party for politicizing the judiciary, the facts show that both parties have dirty hands...

Now, let’s go back to our founding and see what the framers expected...

 Lowering the threshold for confirmation from 60 votes to 50 votes certainly helped the Senate fill the vacant seats with their preferred partisan outcomes, but they created a polarized legal system...

And now we reach the point where where Todd completely disappears up his own poop chute and lands in Happy Bipartisan Gumball Land which bears no relationship to American political reality whatsoever.  

Now, you may wonder, “75 votes?!?! Are you out of your mind? Look at what happened to the Senate when the threshold was 60 votes — it basically ground Senate business to a halt.” 

Yes, it did. But here’s what the 75-vote threshold would trigger: a much different type of nominee from the executive branch. 

If you know going in that you need upward of half of the other party’s senators to get a nominee confirmed, then you would have incentives to find as neutral a nominee as possible...

You mean like Merrick Garland?

Some presidents would attempt to find moderates from their side of the aisle...

You mean like Merrick Garland?

What’s truly distressing is how few sitting senators think raising the threshold for confirmation is a good idea. They are so tied to the partisan outcome they expect from the judiciary that their own party activists have come to expect them to behave as partisan warriors when it comes to judges...

At this point Todd runs out of ways to say Both Sides Do It and turns to the subject of what a huge and terrible (and did I mention huge?) mistake it has been for the Harris campaign not to bend the knee to the Beltway media.

I know many Democrats have an allergy to all things Trump, but the one thing I thought more candidates would learn from his initial campaign in 2016 is that he viewed all media as good for him...

The point is that the Harris folks are going about this all wrong so far...

But here's the thing about Todd (and the advantage of being an OG blogger with a functional memory.)  The reason Todd was an ideal anchor for Meet the Press is that he is completely amoral.  A perfect windsock.  Whichever way the breeze is blowing today, that's the direction you'll find Chuck Todd pointing.

For instance, all the way back in July of 2021, Chuck was interviewed by The Verge magazine.  The subject of the interview was media platforms, streaming service, etc. but then the interviewer went a little deeper, and that's then this happened.  This is all Chuck Todd in The Verge back in 2021 with my emphasis added.

So you have to be fair and have an open mind. Where we did get lost in this, and this sort of happened to mainstream media in particular, is that we did let Republican critics get in our heads, right?

The Republicans have been running on, “There’s a liberal bias in the media.” And talk about, if you say something long enough, there are liberals who say there’s a liberal bias in the media when you see polling now...

The point is, if you say it enough, a lot of people believe it. This has been a 45-year campaign. I mean, Roger Ailes and Pat Buchanan were Nixon guys and basically blamed the media for Watergate. And it’s been a sustained campaign. And Roger Ailes basically built an entire media empire based on this premise that he created during the Nixon era.

We should have fought back better in the mainstream media. We shouldn’t [have] accepted the premise that there was liberal bias. We should have defended. I hear the attacks on fact checkers where they “fact-check Republicans six times more than they fact-check Democrats.” Yeah. Perhaps the Republicans are being factually incorrect more often than the Democrats.

We ended up in this both-sides trope. We bought into the idea that, oh my God, we’re perceived as having a liberal bias. And I think for particularly the first decade of the century, I’d say mainstream media overcorrected. And we bought into the Fox motto of “balance.” And it’s like, Jesus, there’s no balance, they need the truth. There’s fairness, that’s different than balance. And so in that sense, this is why we’re in this defensive posture today.

Jump forward three years and all of has been erased from the memory of man.  Instead you have Todd right back in his Both Sides Do It bag, lamenting that, golly!, Harris campaign is acting like the Beltway media is not to be trusted!

And the degree to which Todd is willing to casually bulldoze down the memory hole the actual reality of the 2016 campaign -- especially the way he and his entire profession burned what little was left of their professional credibility to the ground relentless propping Trump up and tearing Hillary down so they could have the horserace they desperately wanted -- makes me wonder how soon we can expect to see Chuck Todd being rolled out as Fox News' latest Big Name hire.

No Half Measures