It always happens with Maddow, part 1 and then part 2!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2012

Demise of a national treasure: We tend to think that Rachel Maddow is a bit on the dishonest side.

Which is strange. Because yesterday, Alex “Kid” Pareene called her a national treasure! He did this at Salon.

There’s nothing new about that, of course. On December 4, David Atkins also called Maddow a national treasure. Three weeks earlier, dude called Chris Hayes the same thing!

For ourselves, we can’t think of anyone we would call a national treasure. To our ear, the phrase is so monumentally hackneyed that it’s hard to imagine using it.

That said, Pareene’s encomium stuck in our head as the day wore on. Last night, we decided to watch the whole Maddow Show, a task we’ve been skipping of late.

Doggone it! As we watched, the same thing happened that always happens when we take in an evening of Maddow!

For about the first half hour, we thought it might be time to rethink our disgust with Maddow. She is obviously IQ-bright. For that reason, we sometimes get the feeling that we must have been wrong in our past judgments.

But then it happened, pretty much the way it always happens. First, Maddow did a ridiculous report about Susan Rice—a report which simply reeked of bad faith.

There is no way on earth that Maddow believes what she said in that segment. Or so we would have to assume. We assume she can’t be that clueless.

From there, the program moved on to a surprisingly unpleasant takedown of Robert Bork, on the very day he died. Maddow has extremely good manners within the tribe. She’s extremely cold-blooded outside it, and sometimes a bit dishonest.

That said, last evening’s real part 2 came at the end of the program, when Maddow did one of her patented self-correction segments.

The star was perched beneath her familiar DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS sign. In our view, the segment served two basic Maddow purposes:

Rather plainly, it was designed to help us learn to love Maddow even more. And it reinforced a central claim which we liberals tend to repeat in comments: Rachel Maddow always corrects her mistakes!

As usual, the mistake on which she corrected herself was totally trivial—the mispronunciation of the name of the fatuous music act, Ke$ha. Rachel went on and on about how she’s getting so old, unlike her staff.

In our view, this probably helped us learn to love her more.

This foolishness burned a whole segment. But how odd! Rachel didn’t correct herself for mispronouncing Senator Daniel Inouye’s name all through a segment on Monday night. By Tuesday night, she was pronouncing his name correctly—but she didn’t note her repeated mistake from the night before.

Just a guess: Admitting she didn’t know Inouye’s name would have made her look politically clueless. Correcting herself on Ke$ha’s name—well, it didn’t matter much. Plus, she got to play a tape of Ke$ha vapidly explaining how her name actually sounds.

To watch Maddow mispronounce “Inouye” seven times in less than two minutes, just click here. As she does, she will tell you that Inouye was “a genuine American hero.”

You can tell that she really means it.

To watch Maddow’s report on Susan Rice, click here. Tomorrow, we'll discuss what she said.

Yes, she was defending Rice. But every word was bogus.

In our view, Maddow is almost pathologically faux. For that reason, she simply isn’t a national treasure, unless you treasure a world in which clever folk get themselves on TV, then treat average people like rubes.

Extra credit: To get clear about pronouncing Ke$ha, just click this. Based on her look and her on-line back-story, Ke$ha strikes us as a moderately burned-out version of Jewel.