Chuck Todd Is Alive And Well And Living On Conservative Radio

Scientists have long pondered the question: "Is Chuck Todd as big a 'Both Sides Do It' hack as he appeared to be when he had the big chair on Meet the Press, or was he performing the part of a Both Sides Do It hack on Meet the Press because that's what NBC executives require of anyone who sits in that chair?"  

Sadly this question seemed doomed to remain a topic of mere idle armchair speculation, with scientists spending their lunch breaks arguing one side of the question and then swapping around and arguing the other (you know how scientists are) because there was insufficient funding available to build the extremely sensitive equipment that would be required to settle the matter.

And then, one day last week, on local radio, right here in Springfield, Illinois, the matter was settled when Chuck Todd dropped by the Patrick Pfingsten show on WMAY to remove all doubt.

A thing to know about Mr. Pfingsten is that he is, in his own words, "a conservative who's a former Republican" who, like so many other Never Trumpers who got run out of their own party but cannot abide admitting that, far from being the dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing  caricatures his party made us out to be, we on the Left are, in fact, the only group who have been right about the Right all along.  

And so Mr. Pfingsten has taken up residence in the mighty fortress of "Both Sides Do It" about which we had a long chat one post ago.  You should also know that the station where Mr. Pfingsten works also syndicates Brian Kilmeade and Clay Travis, so put a pin in that because it'll come up later.

Anyway, out of the clear blue comes now Chuck Todd to share his cultural and political wisdom two days after Charlie Kirk was killed.  And I, your humble scrivener, listened to the whole fucking thing, grinding a quarter in of enamel off my back molars in the process.  So here are selected portions of that conversation.  It does not start well.

TODD:  Well, here's the thing. We we all kind of know what we should be doing, but in  in some ways, you know, our ... we're going to have to give up hoping our political leaders are going to do the right things.

Right off the bat, fuck you and your "our political leaders" claptrap, Chuck Todd.  It's Republican political leaders, starting with President Shits-His-Pants von Cheats-At-Golf, who throw gas on these fires, and Democratic political leaders who try to tamp it down, which he fucking well knows.

TODD:  Sometimes you need incentives to do the right thing. You need reward structures to do the right thing. And right now all of our incentives are aligned against us ... uh... to, to bring us together. All of the incentives are aligned against us to sort of figure out how to act bipartisan.

And right there, in three short sentences, Chuck Todd memory holes the legacy of the last three Democratic administrations, and the increasingly berserk Republican reactions to each of them.  And, again, Todd fucking well knows better.

 

From The Brookings Institution, April 27, 2012:

Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem

by Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein

...We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

Chuck Todd continues, remembering 9/11 as a great, uniting experience.  

TODD:  9/11 is the last time we ... we ... we really got ... we brought ... got brought together as a country and it lasted a good year or so.  But even when we  stopped being united, y'know, the wars.  The... the wars divided us,  it was respectful right?  It was sort of  conventional political debate.

No surprise that a creature of a Beltway media that rolled over for Bush and Cheney remembers those times very differently than those of us who live in the real world.  There are literally tens of thousands of Liberal blog posts by those of us who were writing about what was really going on in real time, but this should give you a taste of what those "respectful", "conventional" debates  were actually like:

 

The host then chimes in that, yes, it was all great until those god damn Liberals...

PFINGSTEN:  I don't know. There was a lot of calling George Bush a war criminal...

For the record George Bush and Dick Cheney were and are war criminals.

And the rest is just more cask-strength, Chuck Todd Both Sides Do It drivel

TODD:   I mean, this is where I don't, you know, if you go online, most conservatives think most liberals are communists and most liberals think most conservatives are fascists... The online world has us at each other's throats. 

For the record, conservatives were making a living slagging us liberals as dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing monsters long before "the online world" was as omnipresent as it is now.  And, for the record, conservatives nominated a degenerate, corrupt, lying, rapist, racist, fascist for president three times in a row and elected him twice, so yeah, the case for thinking most conservatives are fascists is fucking well open and shut.

TODD:  It is instead like you could build an audience much faster if you go hard right or hard left, right? 

Who is there "hard left" of which Todd speaks?  Where are they?  And what the hell does Todd think "hard left" even means?

TODD:  The left doesn't police the left and the right doesn't police the right.

For the record, everybody polices the left.  The legacy media Tone Police stomp all over any Liberal who raises their voice using unapproved vocabulary.   Meanwhile, nobody polices the Right, which is how hate-vampires like Charlie Kirk came to be.

From Pharyngula of the Free Thought Blogs:

Never has a man’s own words so adeptly justified contempt for him

People are having a grand time digging through Charlie Kirk’s own words to show that he deserved being dragged.

It’s tempting to sit down and just compile a list of all the hateful things the man said — I could spend the next few weeks documenting what a horrible little man he was. But that’s something that should have been done before he was killed, because what should have been assassinated was his reputation while he was cuddling up to racists and anti-semites and anti-gay and trans people, all that stuff journalists shied away from while he was living and building a movement. All we can do now is condemn him when it is too late...

See also, "Murc's Law":

“Murc’s Law” [was] named after a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the punditry that Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats. Do Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to persuade them! Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich? Must be that Democrats didn’t do enough to guide them to better choices! Do Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even D____ T____’s election was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to be clear — on the bizarre grounds that Barack Obama should have rolled over and just let Mitt Romney win in 2012:

Chuck Todd continues:

TODD:  10 years ago, 15 years ago, if  there was a bad actor on one side or the  other, this, you know, there would be people that would speak out about it so that the totality would look bipartisan. 

Barack Obama was president from January, 2009* until January, 2017.  In what fucking universe did the Republican Party's unified, racist, obstruction of every single thing Obama tried to do "look bipartisan" in its totality?  In what fucking universe does Donald Trump oozing down the escalator and into the hearts of the GOP base qualify as heroically standing up to a "bad actor".   

Once again, in one sentence, Todd simply erases the inconvenience part.   

TODD:  And and this is where ... I don't know if this is a leadership problem. It's, y'know, I am ... I am exhausted from pointing fingers somewhere. Oh, it's here, it's here,  it's here. When really, it's all of us, right? 

There's that deep, well-reasoned, fact-based political analysis for which NBC News shelled out big bucks.  

TODD:  And look, I... I accept the premise that there are folks on the left who say, "Yeah, we have our extremists, but we think those guys are worse." And I accept the premise that on the right they say, "We may have our extremists, but those guys are worse."

This, right here -- the media' pathological obsession with providing "Both Sides Do It" political cover for the worst people in America and an all-purpose excuse for the laziest and most cowardly people in America -- is the real reason American politics is fucked.  

But at least those battling scientists can finally move on with their their lives now that the question of  which-came-first has been settled.

Chuck Todd continues:

TODD:   Like take the Matthew Dowd comment. Okay. Terrible thing that he said. What do we think? 125,000 people saw it in real time. It gets amplified on social media, right?

First, as much as it pains me to admit, what Matthew Dowd said wasn't terrible.  At all.  And second, it was Fox News that amplified it... just as they have been originating and amplifying the most grotesque slander during all those halcyon decades of "bad actor" policing and "respectful", "conventional" debate.

And now, let's remove the thing I asked you to pin 527 paragraphs ago and get back to the issue Mr. Pfingsten's fellow WMAY talking heads, Brian Kilmeade and Clay Travis.  

Yes, that Brian Kilmeade:

'Just Kill 'Em': Fox Host Makes Shocking Comment On Homeless People

“Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested this week that homeless people suffering from mental health issues who refuse help should simply be killed...

“Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something,” he said. “Just kill ’em.”

The other two hosts barely react to his remark before continuing their discussion.

WMAY syndicated radio host and Fox News employee, Brian Kilmeade, got to keep his Fox News gig and his WMAY gig after casually suggesting on live television that the homeless should be mass murdered, while Matthew Dowd was crucified by Fox News and fired from his MSNBC gig even after apologizing profusely for what were a few anodyne comments about violent language.   

Which brings it to that other WMAY syndicated radio host, Clay Travis and his violent, unhinged rant about Liberals following the killing of Charlie Kirk.  From Crooks & Liars:

Fox News Contributor Clay Travis  Should Be Fired

The right can say and do anything and are not allowed to be criticized for it.

Clay Travis, the host of Outkick, and a Fox News contributor went a scorched earth to Sean Hannity on the left after the Charlie Kirk shooting and received no push back from Fox News for his antics.

The incendiary rhetoric by most of the right-wing talk shows, media outlets, and podcasters is a staple of the institutions, and they make their living by vilifying the left with eliminationism.

They are quick to vilify anyone else who correctly describes the actions some of them take, as well as their political leaders, and they look for events to pile on.

Matthew Dowd was fired by MSNBC, where is Fox News' accountability?

Where's the accountability, WMAY?

Chuck Todd again:

TODD:   You know, there was a time where we punished a politician that didn't try to unify the country, right? It was just that's bad politics.

By my calculations, Todd had now used up an entire Olympic swimming pool's-worth of Kilz and White-Out to blot out the actual history of the Actual Republican party.  But he's not done yet, because 

the stupidest, most craven and most sinister comment of all was buried inside this slab of mildewed nonsense:

TODD:   And that's what frankly both sides do this. They grab the nubbest, nuttiest thing somebody says in one of these somewhere online and says, grabs it, isolates it, right? Gets it to take off and go viral and say that's all of them, right? This person, it was representative of this entire community, right? And you know, the right has been arguing that this has been happening way too often in ... in mainstream media. And I know exactly. And my answer is yes, you're correct. But the answer isn't to do it that that there should be sort of mutual assured destruction, right? 

At a stroke, Todd has not only told the MAGA mob that, yes, one of their most cherished delusions is real -- that there is a Giant Liberal Media Conspiracy plotting against them -- but that the mainstream media is in on it!  Also, hey asshole, you are the mainstream media.

What are the odds that the next time the Crooked Media lads --

-- or the Bulwark crew -- 

-- welcome Chuck Todd back onto their podcast like a long lost lodge brother, his embarrassing WMAY wallow in the Both Siderist shitpile will be politely forgotten or ignored by the hosts. 

 *  Thanks to Alert Reader Bruce for catching my temporal error.

I Am The Liberal Media