Part 4—Maddow does not know elections: Sometimes, we find the analysts hiding red, swollen eyes.
One such occasion occurred last week. Incomparably, we asked them why they’d been crying again.
Expressing their sympathy for a group we won’t name until tomorrow, they pointed to the following statement from last Wednesday evening’s Rachel Maddow Show.
The passage comes from Maddow’s interview with Candidate Santorum. As we read it, the analysts began quietly sobbing again:
MADDOW (7/22/15): If you don’t—Too funny! Less than three minutes into her Q-and-A with Santorum, Maddow was asking him what he plans to do if he doesn’t win!
I had an interesting conversation with my staff the other day. We were talking about— I was making my case to them about the fact that I think you are a good communicator.
I disagree with you on almost everything. But I think that you—I think that a lot of people have worked very hard on their elocution in this round. People are trying to set themselves apart. A lot of people look like high school debate-losing team captains right now, and you’re a very effective communicator. That’s why I think it will actually hurt you if you don’t get in the debates because I think it’s such an opportunity cost for you.
If you don’t win, if you don’t end up in the debates, if don’t end up getting the nomination, or nobody picks you as VP, what else do you want to do? This is the third time you’ve run for president—
That isn’t why the analysts cried. For now, let’s consider what occurred as that discussion continued:
At this point, Santorum interrupted, telling Maddow that it’s only his second run for the White House. It was the second time that Maddow had mistakenly pegged this run as his third attempt, so he apparently felt he had to correct the record.
That isn’t why the analysts sobbed. But let’s make a basic point here.
Maddow has obsessed about the GOP presidential field, night after night after night after night, for the past three months, dating at least to May 5.
Dating to May 27, she has repeatedly stated the view that Candidate Santorum is the most effective communicator in that field. But so what?
Despite her Rain Man-like, repetitive focus on the GOP primary process, Maddow had somehow gotten it into her head that this was Santorum’s third run for the White House. Moments before, she had made an even stranger remark concerning the rules for getting into this year’s first few GOP debates:
MADDOW (7/22/15): If— So Fox is going to do this thing, and I don’t know if CNN will do the same thing, where they’re going to have what everybody has been sort of derisively calling “the kids’ table,” where you don’t get to be in the real debate but you’re allowed to be in—At this point, Santorum broke in. But what about that highlighted statement? Rachel Maddow “doesn’t know if CNN will do the same thing?”
Just for the record, Fox News is hosting the first GOP debate, on August 6. CNN will host the second GOP debate, on September 16, from the Reagan Library.
CNN announced, long ago, that it will conduct that second debate the same way Fox News will conduct the first. Again, let’s consult the record.
“The Sept. 16, 2015 event will be divided into two parts featuring two groups of candidates,” CNN announced on May 21. “One grouping will feature the top 10 candidates according to public polling, and the other will include candidates who meet the minimum threshold of 1 percent in public polling but are ranked outside the top 10.”
For those who may have missed that announcement, CNN announced it again just a few weeks later.
“The prime-time debate will actually be split into two parts,” CNN declared on June 16, as it unveiled Jake Tapper as the moderator of its debate. “One with the candidates that national polls rank as the top 10 GOP contenders, and one with the candidates who didn't make that cut.”
Which part of those announcements didn’t Maddow understand? Her statement to Santorum last Wednesday night can perhaps, with considerable effort, be defended as almost technically accurate. But it extended a persistent feature of her obsessive nightly monologues about the upcoming debates:
In those nightly monologues, Maddow assails Fox, Fox News and the Fox News Channel for running the first GOP debate on this disgraceful two-tier basis. As a general matter, she does this without telling viewers that CNN has adopted the same basic structure for the second debate.
Routinely, she fails to make another obvious point—to all appearances, the RNC has agreed on this structure for those initial debates. In hours of repetitive broadsides, Maddow’s viewers rarely hear this basic point stated. They never hear this obvious point analyzed or discussed.
It’s hard to avoid a basic thought about Maddow’s amazingly repetitive broadcasts:
Night after night, liberal viewers see Maddow assail Fox News for the disgraceful way it has chosen to eliminate candidates from the first debate. They don’t hear that CNN is planning to do the exact same thing. They don’t even hear that the RNC seems to be down with this process.
It’s hard to avoid a basic thought as this pattern continues. In her stunningly repetitive monologues, Maddow is feeding us liberal viewers a pleasing plate of tribal gruel.
Over and over and over and over, we tune in to our favorite show to hear “Fox News” assailed for the way it’s running that first debate. Below, you see the way she delivered the diatribe last night, as she railed about “this ridiculous Fox News ten-candidate cut-off:”
MADDOW (7/29/15): I should tell you that [new] Reuters/Ipsos poll is an online poll. It is not generally considered to be as good as a telephone poll. All these polls have different methodologies and different sample sizes now, but it feels worth to it report all of them as they come out because nobody knows which polls are going to be included in the calculations by Fox News Channel when Fox News Channel averages five recent national polls in order to decide which ten candidates they’re going to allow into the Republican debate next week.Most of those amazingly narrow complaints are specific to Fox and to next week’s debate. But “this ridiculous Fox News ten-candidate cut-off” is also “this ridiculous CNN ten-candidate cut-off.”
So, I mean, maybe they’ll consider this new Reuters poll. Maybe they won’t. I don’t know. They’re not saying.
Fox will not say how they’ll cut people in and out of their debate. We’re just supposed to accept that they’re going to do it somehow and the candidates are supposed to accept it when Fox pronounces who is allowed to debate for the Republican presidential nomination and who is not.
We keep trying to guess what Fox might do. Our best estimation of what Fox might decide is what we call our "Who’s Allowed to Compete Cable News-Derived Random Number Generator.” When we plug in the polls which Fox may or may not use to determine eligibility for the debate, it looks to me like there are basically eight places on the debate stage that are fairly safe right now...
But that leaves the whole rest of the field fighting it out for the last two places on stage. And up until today, this ridiculous Fox News ten-candidate cut-off had meant that there were eight candidates battling it out for the last two seats on stage.
Well, as of today, it will be nine candidates battling it out for those last two seats on stage, because today, the Republican candidate number 17 has filed his paper work the FCC. It’s my friend, Jim Gilmore, former governor of Virginia. He also ran for president in 2008.
Jim Gilmore. Full disclosure—I only call him “my friend” on TV because his campaign sometimes answers the phone when we call them. That qualifies as “my friend” in this day and age.
Jim Gilmore today filed his papers to become the 17th Republican candidate in the race. No word from Fox yet on whether or not they’ll let Jim Gilmore—presumably he’s not going to make the top ten, right? But is Fox going to let him into the second-tier event, their also-ran “kids table” event that they’re doing before the real debate? I don’t know.
I mean, if they don’t include him, there will be no justification for that. But who knows if they’ll let him in?
The rules from Fox News, they may not be arbitrary. They may be very firm rules. But as far as we can tell, they’re secret and nobody knows who Fox News will let in and who Fox News is not going to let in, either for the main debate or for both events, the “kids table” and the debate.
And that is really how the Republican Party is choosing its presidential nominee this year. It is just astonishing.
It seems to be “this ridiculous RNC ten-candidate cut-off” too.
Maddow delivers this diatribe every night. We’ll guess that the vast majority of her viewers don’t understand those elementary points.
Is this the best way to run these debates, given the presence of seventeen candidates who might at least seem to be major? We don’t know, but we wouldn’t call this procedure “astonishing.”
Here’s what we would call astonishing. It’s amazing that a journalist can discuss this topic night after night, at considerable length, over the course of three solid months, without giving viewers a fuller picture of the way this procedure is working.
We already thought it was astonishing when Maddow kept flogging this dead fish night after night, beating the carcass of Fox, almost always without mentioning CNN or the apparent role of the RNC.
It went a step beyond “astonishing” when she spoke to Santorum last week.
Rachel Maddow “doesn’t know if CNN will do the same thing?” Astonishing, our dear Watson—although that actually isn’t why the analysts had red, swollen eyes.
For today, let’s leave it here, stating one basic point:
Basic point: It’s astonishing to see how little Maddow seems to know about the topic on which she has chosen to obsess, with the Rain Man’s zeal, since at least May 5.
In the history of cable news, has anyone ever spent so much time discussing a topic about which she seemed to have so little to say? For months, Maddow has pimped Santorum as the best communicator in the field, a man the pundits should be watching—but she doesn’t even know how many times he has run in the past?
Each night, she attacks the perfidy of Fox. But she doesn’t know if CNN is planning do the same thing?
The clueless comments occur each night. There’s no way we can discuss them all. That said, consider this groaner:
Last Thursday night, Maddow complained about the way “the Beltway press” had been discussing Ross Perot’s 1992 third-party race.
Amazingly, she made some accurate statements about that year’s exit polls. She then offered a grossly speculative analysis, on the basis of which she said that Perot probably cost Clinton votes.
Everything is possible, but on its face, Maddow’s analysis made no actual sense. Softly, the analysts started to whimper. But then, they saw her say this:
MADDOW (7/23/15): Poppy Bush did not lose the presidency in 1992 because of Ross Perot. Poppy Bush lost the presidency in 1992 because he had a 33 percent approval rating. He would have lost to a chia pet.“We have no idea what the Donald Trump third-party candidacy would be like, and who it would help and who it would hurt?”
And now, we are facing the prospect of another outsider, a somewhat conservative, somewhat hard to place businessman who doesn’t play by the political rules, and he might self-finance and run a third-party candidacy against both the Democrats and Republicans.
Oh my God, won’t that make debates more fun? We’re facing that again!
But what the Republicans are trying to sell you about this prospect, what they’ve been trying to sell you about this prospect forever, what the Beltway press today is eagerly repeating and regurgitating as if 1992 was too long ago for any of us to live through it, the story they are telling you about what it would mean for Donald Trump to run as a third-party candidate, is that it would doom the otherwise inevitable Bush presidency.
Well, that was not true for Poppy Bush in 1992. And if you are extrapolating from that experience, there is no reason to believe it would be true for Jeb Bush in 2016 or for whoever else the Republicans pick to be their nominee.
Bad history makes for bad punditry. The Ross Perot myth you keep hearing today is a myth. It is total bunk.
We have no idea what the Donald Trump third-party candidacy would be like, and who it would help and who it would hurt.
For now, Donald Trump is the clear unequivocal front runner for the Republican nomination, as hard as that is for other Republicans to grasp. He’s beating all other Republican candidates.
Republicans should stop worrying about what they’re going to do if he hypothetically is the third-party candidate and they should worry about what they’re going to do if he is the actual Republican nominee.
MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt joins us next.
From anyone other than Maddow, that would have seemed astonishing. From her, it seemed to be par for the very peculiar corporate liberal course.
Why was “the Beltway press” suggesting that a third-party run by Candidate Trump could damage the GOP? We’ll let The Hill’s Jonathan Easley explain, though everyone on the planet had already done so by the time Maddow declaimed:
EASLEY (7/21/15): If Donald Trump leaves the GOP and runs as an independent candidate for president, it would badly damage Republican prospects for winning the White House, a new poll finds.According to the 1992 exit polls, Candidate Perot drew evenly from Candidates Clinton and Bush. That doesn’t mean that a third-party Candidate Trump would affect things the same way.
An ABC News-Washington Post poll released late Monday showed that in a head-to-head matchup, former secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D) has a small lead over former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) at 50 percent to 44 percent.
However, in a three-way matchup between Clinton, Bush and Trump, Trump siphons off significant support from Bush, propelling Clinton to a 16-point lead.
In that scenario, Clinton takes 46 percent over Bush at 30 percent and Trump at 20 percent. Bush was the only Republican contender the poll tested in a three-way match up with Clinton and Trump.
No matter! In the face of that major poll, Maddow blunderbussed dumbly ahead, saying “we have no idea” who such a candidacy would help or hurt. But then, this is Santorum’s third campaign. And she doesn’t know if CNN will run its debate that same way!
Maddow’s overall cluelessness concerning these, her chosen topics, is truly amazing. We’re not sure we’ve ever seen a major broadcaster devote so much time to a topic concerning which she seemed so clueless, concerning which she had so little to say.
That isn’t why the analysts sobbed. Tomorrow, we’ll finish our discussion of last week’s three nights in the life.
When we do, we plan to reveal why the analysts cried. We may even tear up ourselves, as we tell you why we think this insulting, three-month corporate sideshow has been such a disgrace.
Tomorrow: Empathizing on their behinds with those Maddow staffers
Perhaps, Uncle Bob, you should have the analysts, the "youngsters," nap more frequently.
ReplyDeleteBob only uses the analysts as irony. The irony is he uses them as a cute funny recurring bit to make us like him. They cry because he beats them with a xylophone hammer.
DeleteThat evokes memories of the old mouse piano (Monty Python).
DeleteYou might tell that to Judge Wapner.
Deletehttp://www.nht.nhs.uk/main.cfm?type=THEFORESTCENTRE
Why does R.M. reserve her indignity about the two tier debate classification where there is a grown up table and the rickety card table for the children when she is relegated to MSNBC, NBC's version of the children's table.
ReplyDelete*yawn*
Delete@ 12:32
DeleteThe typical reaction of R.M's scant viewers one minute into her show just before they nod off to slumber land.
In 2005, Santorum introduced the Workplace Religious Freedom Act along with Senator John Kerry.
DeleteFrom the 1/15/13 edition of ReligiousLiberty.TV
DeleteIn 2005, in a rarely seen bipartisan effort, Sen. Kerry joined with Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) to introduce the Senate version and it was concurrently introduced in the House of Representatives by Mark Souder (R-IN), Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), Bobby Jindal (R-LA) and Anthony Weiner (D-NY). Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) also lined up in support.
Bob Somerby watches a lot of cable news. Me too. I find it very difficult to follow FOX and MSNBC at the same time, much less CNN. It makes me appreciate Bob's complaints about the delay in transcripts.
ReplyDeleteBut I just want to go on the record. Rachel has been given a very unfair time slot. She follows "Hardball" and "All In." Not much news is generated during that time, so she is working with material they have first crack at. The only way she can make her show interesting is to bring something different and she uses humor.
I thought the "Dog Pee Won't Stop Santorum" story was hilarious. I can understand why Santorum used it as a campaign speech. I understand why the headline was funny. And given his "man on dog" sex comment and the subsequent Goggle bomb, I even understand why someone with Maddow's wicked sense of humor found making it a URL was clever.
I also now have a better idea why Somerby had to go quit comedy and go into blogging.
Fine up until your cheap shot at the end. Somerby is retirement age. He more likely quit comedy because he is tired of the travel involved. He's been blogging for decades are there is no evidence he quit any other career to blog.
DeleteI don't find Maddow's sense of humor "wicked." I find it sad, for two reasons. First, laughing at pee and poop and farts is funny to 4-10 year old boys. Second, Santorum found himself in his dog situation because he was being friendly to a prospective voter. He was doing what candidates must do to get elected. It wasn't anything related to his actions or his policies that got him peed on. So, it seems unfair to saddle him with that, over and over. He was gracious about it and showed a sense of humor himself and then Maddow beats him to death with it. That just seems petty and unfair.
What troubles me more is that Maddow is unselective in what she targets as a source for humor. She doesn't have principled arguments as a liberal and she seems to place liberal issues second to her own career interests. If she cannot systematically cover the days events (because Hayes and Matthews got there first), she can target specific issues and go into them in depth, do some actual reporting (much as John Oliver does or Diane Rehm, without the humor). She could be a real journalist. Instead she treats her show as if it were something to get through and time to fill up, instead of an opportunity to inform people and further liberal causes.
Like soap operas, she finds a bit and then stretches it out as long as possible. In contrast, Conan O'Brien repeats his bits -- but they are funny each time because he doesn't repeat the jokes, just the set up. Maddow could study how he does that, or hire better writers (or both).
In the meantime, Somerby's point is well taken. If she is going to be a reporter instead of a comedian, she needs to get her facts straight. These small mistakes are important because they reveal something about her attitude toward her job and her listeners. She is assuming the news isn't the mail focus and that her listeners won't sweat the little stuff because they are there to laugh at dog pee, just as you are. That may be true. I'm not an analyst, but that makes me cry.
Your response 12:37 might be fine too except you took a cheap shot at Maddow. Maddow didn't beat Santorum to death with anything. The dog pee story is something Santorum uses as a stock part of his speeches. It is delivered as a comedy bit designed to get laughs.He has used it for years. And the headline written in the Florida paper covering one of his speeches makes it even funnier.
DeleteSo it takes a generally idiotic person to think Maddow's use of the story is beating up on poor Mr. Santorum.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/rick-santorum-tells-story-kent-tekulve-old-lady-151112902.html
Bob Somerby has the experience to critique Maddow's comedy. But what does he know about reporting?
DeleteDoes it take an expert to know that a reporter should get her facts straight?
DeleteHoly Madre de Dios. Bob Somerby just complained that someone is repetitive?
ReplyDeleteBob "the Howler" Somerby just accused someone of a "Rain Man-like, repetitive focus?????"
Round up the analysts and get them in the custody of Child Protective Services.
And for heaven's saker get a court order. Without one, as I now understand it, he can still legally buy a gun.
Somerby runs a vanity blog. Rachel Maddow runs a prime time MSNBC cable news show. Can there possibly be any difference between the two?
DeleteWhy do you think of the analysts as children? Are there any child-age analysts anywhere in real life? This suggests something about your own fantasy life, not Somerby.
Obsession, thy name is troll.
Someone else has fantasies because Bob Somerby, a former elementary teacher, writes repetitively about imaginary children who read the news and cry all the time?
DeleteAnalyst are more likely to be interns, but since they are imaginary they are what ever you want them to be and you are clearly fixated on those crying children.
DeleteGack!
DeleteA valid question may have been raised by
Delete@ 1:06. In our view it is fuzzy.
Are you asking what is the difference between a vanity blog
and a cable news show?
Or are you asking the difference between what Somerby does and Maddow does?'
I felt that I just read the longest run on sentence ever created...enough!
ReplyDeleteAlas!
DeleteThere is a reason you felt that way YBTT. You did.
DeleteAnd if the feeling persists among enough voters for over four hours, that sentence qualifies as a dick-grabbing story and may no longer be told at the kid's table.
I have to agree with Mr. Somerby, I find Maddow's obsession with the first GOP debate bizarre, annoying a huge waste of time.
ReplyDeleteIn the first place, she frames the issue like it's one of the most important political events of the 2016 election. It's a freakin' debate in the middle of August. The only people wild with anticipation are her and the media Trump Groupies who can't get themselves enough of The Donald.
In the second place, this is an extremely unusual set of circumstances on the GOP side, where at last count there are 17 persons competing for the nomination. In all honesty, the plan to limit the number of participants to 10 doesn't seem so crazy. Look, these televised "debates" in general are a joke and bare little resemblance to a real debate. If they were going to stage a real debate with even 10 participants, it would need to be at least 6 - 8 hours in length.
Finally, who gives a shit? Really, Rachel, I don't give a shit if Carly Fiorina is on the stage that night. Christ, she gets enough free time on your network already and you still need a microscope to see her poll numbers.
Ladies, Gentlemen, Howler Readers
Deleteand Pre-human Pseudo-Somethings everywhere!
Better than Ms. M's Friday News Dump Prize
TDH's RAIN-MAN REDUNDANCY RIBBON
And the first winner is:
mm July 30, 2015 at 1:30 PM
"I have to agree with Mr. Somerby....."
@ mm
DeleteHRC claimed to be the only female candidate in the PORUS race......But that old memory of hers was finally jogged a few seconds later when she remembered Fiorina and then HRC morphed into SNL character Roseanne Roseannadanna.
Liz Kreutz
✔ @ABCLiz
HRC mentions "those guys on the other side." Then says, "They're all guys, btw." Then pauses. "Oh. There's one woman. I forgot about that."
Spoken like one of the David Brock Correct The Record recruited "nerd virgins"*
Delete*Paul Begala term for Brock's Super PAC minions
Perot may have helped elect Clinton. No poll, not even an exit poll, can tell you how people who voted for Perot would have voted for if Perot had not run, raised the issues he raised, and said the things he did which had an impact on the way people viewed President Bush and Candidate Clinton over time leading up to they day they voted.
ReplyDeleteAll an exit poll tells you is how a person answered the instant they responded to a question at the moment they were asked.
The rough rule of both thumbs up your ass applies. Anything is possible and we don't know.
"Perot may have helped elect Clinton." -- but there's no evidence for that proposition. Anonymous here elevates his own speculations in lieu of any facts.
Delete"All an exit poll tells you.." is what people who went into voting booths said about their preferences, making it imperfect, but better than anything else we've got. Certainly better than Anonymous speculations.
And what it tells us is that people who said that they voted for Perot also said that if they'd been unable to vote for him, they'd have split their votes almost evenly between Clinton and Bush.
So the rule of rough thumbing applies: If a person says a poll doesn't tell you something, and then offers their own speculations as a substitute, they've probably got one thumb up their own ass and they're trying to put the other in your eye.
Jack, your are within the margin of error.
DeleteYou, of course recognize, I hope, that exit polls ask people who voted for Perot after he conducted a campaign.
Had Perot disappeared as a candidate in the spring or early summer, and Clinton/Bush had the stage and media to themselves you have no idea what people who eventually got persuaded Bush was a schmoe by Perot would have done.
He didn't. And he slammed Bush pretty hard. And those in the exit poll absorbed some of that information before they went to the polls, cast their ballot for H. Ross, and then got quizzed by the TV folks looking to be the first to make the call in election night coverage.
My guess is Clinton would have won if H. Ross went away in spring or summer. Just as a blogger I know of once guessed some of Hillary Clinton's supporters are her biggest problem. Retrospective guessing on hypotheticals is always a winner. But an exit poll can't ask people to go back and remember how they might have voted if they could erase H. Ross from their memory. I would like to do that and I voted gladly for Clinton.
Here's the elephant in the room that 3:49 wants to hide.
DeleteIn 1992, 37,5 percent of the people voted to retain a sitting president in office. 62.5 percent voted for someone else.
To put it in historical perspective, 37.5 percent of the vote was the lowest for a major party candidate for president since George McGovern pulled 37.5 in 1972, Heck, even Walter Mondale pulled 40.6 against Reagan. And the last sitting president to lose in a landslide, Jimmy Carter, got 41 percent.
And we are talking about a sitting president. That's the ultimate "job approval" rating, isn't it? It takes quite a leap of faith to think that people who voted against a sitting president and for a third-party candidate would have gravitated to the sitting president in enough numbers to reverse the election.
Also remember that without Perot, Perot voters still had three choices -- Bush, Clinton or neither one. They could have voted for another third-party candidate or stayed home.
No doubt about it Elephant Spotter. You have correctly identified what happened based on a set of circumstances which can be observed.
DeleteNow, explain to us exactly what 3:49 said that hid any of that. Then explain why anyone would want to hide it.
"Perot may have helped elect Clinton."
DeleteThen he repeats it later, noting how H. Ross "slammed" Bush.
Now he can hide behind "we don't know" and his "guess" that Clinton would have won anyway, which would make his whole argument moot, but the fact remains that a sitting president got 37.5 percent of the vote.
Kinda hard to for an incumbent to get re-elected with 37.5 no matter how many candidates are running against him/her.
Would his percentage have gone up without Perot? No doubt. But enough to win? I don't think you have to guess or hide behind "we don't know."
Maddow once compared her show to the Daily Show. Shows you how deluded she is.
ReplyDeleteBack in 2010, Jon Stewart pegged MSNBC show hosts as Herman, Lily, Eddie, Grandpa, and Marilyn. Not sure who Stewart figured was R.M's alter ego.
Delete"MSNBC Is Like The Munsters. Everyone else over there is ****in' nuts!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LO4yFTTZYs
http://ccinsider.comedycentral.com/2...-the-munsters
You've made this point before, 5:19.
Delete"It’s hard to avoid a basic thought about (your) amazingly repetitive (comment).
It’s hard to avoid a basic thought as this pattern continues.
Over and over and over and over, we tune in to our favorite (blog) to hear (Maddow once compared her show to the Daily Show).
Here’s what we would call astonishing. It’s amazing that a (commenter) can (repeat) this (line) night after night, at considerable length, over the course of (innumerable Maddow posts by Somerby)."
BTW here is a fairly recent comparison of herself to the Daily Show:
"The Daily Show was set up to look like a news set on purpose," said Maddow. "Effectively, it is a news show, just a really funny one. I do think that their success with that formula has made room in the rest of the news business for folks to show more personality and use more humor. We all suck in comparison, but Jon Stewart’s success has given us a little more room to roam within the confines of covering the news." Rachel Maddow 2/11/15
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-02-11/rachel-maddow-and-chris-hayes-on-what-jon-stewart-wrought
OTOH don't go getting your hopes up. Others may compare yourself to mm, but he's keeping the Rain Man Redundancy Ribbon
She does suck in comparison. No question about that. In her quote she shows again how further deluded and dumb she is. Stewart tried to tell her once point blank. Just because a comedian plays a role as a newscaster for laughs doesn't give a newscaster liscense to be a comedian! What an idiotic statement by her. You can see that she believes it. And we all know she's a horrible comedian but why should we think she would be a good one? She never was a comedian. She's not a comedian. She only thinks she is one due to completely faulty logic as you can see in her quote.
DeleteIf a comedian made a show that was set up to look like an accounting firm on purpose would it effectively be an accounting firm? Would it make room in the rest of the accounting business and accountants to use more humor? No! Any comedian would tell you no!! The accountants could do it and think it as Maddow does but they would suck at it as she does because neither of them are comedians! There's an obvious reason why she and all the people to whom she refers suck at it - because they are out of their element and deluded!
DeleteAs a newscaster, Maddow doesn't just "use more humor" because of Stewart - she steals his act and does a poor imitation and has for years.
DeleteSpeaking of repetitive, "Maddow is no Jon Stewart" is quite and interesting and oft-repeated cant in this combox.
DeleteJust because she tries to inject some humor and personality into her show at times doesn't mean she's trying to be Jon Stewart any more than George Carlin was trying to be Bud Abbott because they were both comedians, after all.
But then again, apples-to-oranges analogies have never stopped either Somerby or his loyal two dozen remaining fans.
It's a version of the Clinton Rules. Bob gets to write anything he wants about Maddow, and his ever-loyal fans will lap it up, having ceded their critical thinking skills to the Master long ago.
You're lying to yourself. She steals his name super jokes and clearly rips him off. Stop lying dude. It has nothing to do with Bob who has never said anything about the topic. Stewart himself criticized her to her face telling her what he was doing was comedy and what she was doing was something different (so stop thinking it's not). She disagreed, couldn't see it - was too wrapped up in a protective ego shell to face the truth that she is not a comic.
DeleteJon Stewart, George Carlin and Bud Abbott are comedians. Are you saying Maddow is a comedian? Did your vast critical thinking skills lead you to that belief? Because the whole point is and the truth is: she's not. Can't you see that? Use your critical thinking skills - is Maddow a comedian like Jon Stewart, George Carlin and Bud Abbott?
Delete"Use you critical thinking skills" ???? Please, while this blog does not moderate comments, bullying will be fiercely protested.
DeleteNo, 10:12, I am saying the exact opposite. Just because she injects some humor and personality in her show does NOT mean she is a comedian trying to steal Stewart's schtick.
DeleteThe "Maddow is no Stewart" theme exists only in the feeble minds of those reaching for any stick to beat her with.
No, she is not Jon Stewart. But neither is she trying to be, no matter how many times Bob and his fans click their heels and make believe.
You don't think Maddow is trying to be Stewart? We'll have to agree to disagree on that one.
DeleteDid you ever see Somerby's "Material World" show? I did. Once. A long time ago.
DeleteTalk about a wanna be.
@ 12:54 - he did learn a valuable lesson that would guide him through his blogger years: "One thing this business teaches you is to hate the public."
Delete“We have no idea what the Donald Trump third-party candidacy would be like, and who it would help and who it would hurt?”
ReplyDeleteAnd that is just about the wisest thing any pundit could possibly say in July 2015 about the November 2016 race. And only a fool would pretend he does know.
Enter Bob Somerby.
Our intrepid blogger takes a single poll, taken in July 2015 that shows head to head between Hillary and Jeb, then a three-way with Trump to show definitively how the race will turn out many months from now.
Here's a clue, Bob. We have no idea who the GOP nominee will be. The party could be crazy enough to nominate Trump for all we know. And although we might have a stronger idea, we also don't know for certain who the Democratic nominee will be. After all, Hillary had the nomination pretty much locked up in July 2007, didn't she? At least, according to the "experts."
We also have no idea what issues will emerge by then. That's because we can't predict the future. The issues could be the laundry list we see now, or some big event might happen and that becomes the big issue.
"We don't know . . ." in July 2015 how the November 2016 election will pan out are wise words indeed, and something that you are not likely to read on this blog.
In our view, you seem to read "we don't know" on this blog almost perhaps as many times as you read "anything is possible." Except when Pee Wee-Peter Pan-Mickey Mouse says it. Or anyone else he has multiply nicknamed mutters it. Then our mature-beyond-his-years blogger seems to cuff them aside to dry the eyes of his analysts and to delight his intelligent fan base.
DeleteThat said, he's a poet. He's a picker.
He's a real dick grabber.
DeleteBob, Mo D is at it again over at the Times. She' looking for a Biden 2016 run (with ultra-scoop that she knows what Beau said to dad on his death-bed) and taking liberties with Tom Brady's case even. Your presence is requested, stat.
ReplyDelete