DEATH BY STUPID: Smartest person's compliant guest host!

THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2016

Part 3—Kornacki extends a pattern: Arguably, the smartest person on TV is on her summer vacation.

Last summer, the smartest person spent her summer vacation taking a long train ride with her parents and her partner. On the train, her mother played hearts and kibitzed at length with John Doe of the little-known band, X, which appeared on American Bandstand all the way back in the 1980s.

How do we know what the smartest person did on her summer vacation? We know because she wasted everyone's time in May telling us all about it.

Over the years, the smartest person's TV show has become a personality cult. The smartest person lets us join the club, in which we serve as Maddowsketeers.

We learn to adore the smart person more fully. For better or worse, we liberals are too gullible, too dumb, to see the problem with constant drivel of this low-IQ type:

MADDOW (5/16/16): (VIDEO CLIP OF LITTLE-KNOWN BAND, X)

That is John Doe. That is John Doe. That's when John Doe and Exene Cervenka led the amazing band, X. They were on American Bandstand way back in the early 1980s.

That was an impressionable time for me as a human being. And John Doe was the first famous person I ever patterned on as a cool person. The first super-cool person I recognized, I always wanted to be like John Doe.

My brother and I never agreed on anything, still don't. The one thing we agreed on was loving the band X and loving John Doe and everything he's done since then.

And I kid you not. After a lifetime of me being a John Doe fan, last year I ended up on a train trip, a long-haul train trip with my partner Susan and my parents, a little vacation. And it turned out John Doe was on our train. And my mom and John Doe, yes, that John Doe, sat together and played Crazy 8s on the train, the card game.

They played Crazy 8s and gin rummy. They were very competitive with each other, and it was amazing. That is John Doe who I've always worshiped. John Doe!

We even got to see photos from the trip. In such ways, we're constantly instructed in ways to adore the smartest person more fully.

Why did the smartest person waste our time that way? Duh! That day, the judge in the so-called Bridgegate case had been scheduled to release the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the case. "The Nun" had been pimping the upcoming event, hoping it would help her get Chris Christie locked up in jail.

Wouldn't you know it? In response to an emergency motion, the judge had postponed the release of the list. And who had filed the emergency motion?

Of course! Someone named John Doe! To the smartest person, this meant she should waste our time with memories of last summer's train trip, complete with photos of Mom playing cards with the real John Doe.

She helped us learn to adore her more fully, then pleasured us with the suggestion that Christie would be on that list, that he might be John Doe. In these ways, the smartest person make us liberals very dumb.

Last night, the smartest person's guest host continued a horrible pattern. Her guest host was Steve Kornacki, who once stood out on cable news as someone who actually knows things.

In the past year, the suits have had Kornacki refashion himself for TV consumption as the most energetic person. Last night, playing that role, Kornacki discussed the greatness of John B. Comey and his infallible insights.

Almost surely, this smartest program's dumbed-down viewers failed to notice the con.

How infallible are the insights of the lionized John B. Comey? If you want to start assessing that question, we'll recommend this piece at Slate by the highly experienced Fred Kaplan.

Needless to say, Kaplan wasn't on your "TV machine thingy" last night. (That's the way the smartest person likes to describe your TV set. In this way, she helps us see that she's much more fey than we are.)

Kaplan wasn't present on cable last night. The information in Kaplan's report wasn't presented either.

Instead, Kornacki rattled a somewhat garbled, Comey-friendly account of the great man's "revelations." Presumably, this text had been constructed by the smartest person's profoundly unimpressive staff.

Energetically, Kornacki noted that the Clinton campaign hadn't yet responded to Comey's revelations.
He then spoke with Ellen Tauscher, who he quickly interrupted.

He didn't mean to interrupt her. But he quickly did:

KORNACKI (7/6/16): In response to those specific revelations and contradictions, we have heard nothing from Hillary Clinton or from her campaign. The question is, can they really just continue to say nothing about this? And if they do have to say something about this eventually, what are they going to say?

Joining us now is Ellen Tauscher, former California congresswoman who also served under Hillary Clinton as under secretary of state for arms control and international security. She's a Hillary Clinton supporter.

Thanks for joining us. Let me start with, Doesn't Hillary Clinton owe an answer to what James Comey said yesterday and what he revealed?

TAUSCHER: Well, I think that the State Department gave partly an answer today when the State Department pushed back pretty significantly. They have done their own research of these e-mails. In the case of the e-mails that were potentially characterized as classified, so said FBI Director Comey yesterday, the truth of the matter is, that was a mistake. At least two of those e-mails were mischaracterized and actually did not contain classified information.

So I think the real issue here, Steve, is that—

KORNACKI: But— I don't mean to interrupt you, but you're saying at least two— Let's make sure we get the numbers straight.

He didn't mean to interrupt. But just that quickly, he did.

(In fairness, Tauscher had already misstated her initial point. As such, we see two familiar patterns enacted here. We see the official Clinton defender who can't even state her first point correctly. She's matched with the energetic corporate liberal who seems to assume Comey's infallible greatness.)

Fred Kaplan wasn't present last night. Neither was the information in his Slate report. As such, we saw a horrible pattern continue, in which Maddow pretends to fight the "Beltway" powers-that-be while bowing to their conventional wisdom.

Tell the truth. Is anyone dumber than the smartest person?

Granted, her self-adoring personality cult is pretty much off the charts. But is anyone dumber than this person and her adoring staff?

We'll say the answer is no.

All last week, the smartest person plied us with her world-class political dumbness. In closing today, let's cite one example—her absurd account of the history of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which helps display her cluelessness about the politics of the "Clinton scandal" era in general.

Maddow often seems deeply clueless about this era, which hasn't exactly ended. Her account of the history of Don't Ask, Don't Tell betrays a tremendous political dumbness about the early 1990s. It also seems to betray an unfortunate distaste for Bill Clinton.

You can read her history of yourself. In it, she compares the skill and greatness of President Obama to the bungling of President Clinton.

Her account of what happened in 1992 and 1993 is criminally clueless. She doesn't even get her own age right when, inevitably, she tells us what she was thinking and feeling during Bill Clinton's first week in office, when she was just 19.

Eventually, this was the smartest person's thumbnail. This thumbnail is off-the-charts stupid:

MADDOW (6/30/16): Don't Ask, Don't Tell stayed on the books for almost two decades. The next time we got a Democratic president, Barack Obama had the same stated objective as Bill Clinton when he came into the office on that issue. He said he would end the ban on gay people serving in the military. But this time, the second time around, his plan worked.

And maybe it was because President Obama was better at these kind of politics than President Clinton was. Maybe, maybe, honestly he benefited from Bill Clinton screwing it up so badly, so we all had seen one way not to do it, and everybody knew not that try it that way again.

Maybe it was just that time had passed. Maybe it's a combination of all of those things.

But for whatever reason, President Obama really nailed it on Don't Ask, Don't Tell and there were a lot of skeptics, among them myself. A lot of people thought he wasn`t doing it right. A lot of people second and triple guessing him, right?

There was noise about it too, right? Same as there had been in the 1990s against President Clinton. There was plenty of resistance. But he got it done.

Good God. "Same as it had been in the 1990s?" If you recall what happened at all, that's just dumbfoundingly dumb. But we liberals were served such nonsense all last week by "arguably the smartest person on TV."

Maddow seems to have no idea how politics worked in the Clinton/Gore era. Her deeply unimpressive staff seems to be equally clueless.

That said, the children who work for our corporate liberal channel seem to have little taste for fighting The Power on these matters. That pattern continued last night.

In the fall of 2012, they rolled over and died regarding Susan Rice and Benghazi. Last summer, Chris Hayes pimped the ludicrous "bombshell report" in the New York Times about the scary uranium deal—the bombshell report the Times took from the conservative hack with shom they had swung that very strange deal.

Last night, the pattern continued. There was Kornacki, pimping the revelations of the infallible Comey. Fred Kaplan and his information were nowhere to be found.

The children seem to have no idea about the basic structure of the "Clinton scandal" era, an era which hasn't ended. Beyond that, they seem to have no taste for fighting The Power when it comes to such concerns.

Viewers gulping this low-IQ porridge are told that the porridge is liberal—and smart!

Tomorrow: Ferrari gear and an appalling "special report"

Once again, a suggestion: Fred Kaplan wasn't on cable last night. You can read his essay here.