Several years later, a few people notice!

THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 2017

Big cable clown gets smacked: Rachel Maddow has been floundering badly, and floundering strangely, for at least the past several years. To cite one bizarre example:

In the spring of 2015, she started a 13-week jihad against Fox News—a completely ridiculous nightly jihad which was about as strange as anything we've ever seen on cable.

No one in the liberal world noticed how bogus this was. Our career players are very good at averting their gaze from the weird behavior of liberals with power and status. Remember when no one noticed that Keith Olbermann was behaving so badly, misogynistically-wise?

Oops! As it turned out, it wasn't that no one had noticed. It was just that no one wanted to speak up in public. When the JournoList transcripts leaked, it turned out that quite a few major liberals had been discussing Olbermann's misogyny, even using using that word—but they had chosen to do so only in private.

We still can't see Rebecca Traister without remembering her role in that disgraceful group silence. Can you see Traister without remembering? We wonder how you do it!

Yesterday, for whatever reason, the protective shield around the increasingly ludicrous Maddow finally broke down. At Slate, Willa Paskin knocked her for her "cynical" conduct in her ludicrous Tuesday evening program about the non-1040 form 1040 form.

Last night, Stephen Colbert even mocked Maddow right there on CBS! (Warning! Not even slightly funny!)

This morning, Margaret Sullivan grabbed the baton in the Washington Post. Sullivan captured the maddening experience of watching Maddow in these, the devolution years.

Hard-copy headline included. Note the highlighted points:

SULLIVAN (3/16/17): For Trump's taxes, Maddow chose the loooong form

In journalism, it’s called “burying the lede.”

And Rachel Maddow gave a master class in just that on her MSNBC show Tuesday night.

With huge numbers of viewers tuned in because of her earlier tweet that she had obtained President Trump’s tax returns, she talked . . . and talked . . . and talked. For an eternity—or close to 20 minutes, which certainly felt like an eternity—viewers heard about everything except the actual news. We got Russian oligarchs, Cypriot banks, the firing of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and much more.

[...]

About 10 minutes in, I started wondering what would have happened if Maddow, rather than David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post, had been sent the “Access Hollywood” video? How long, how long, would we have waited to find out what a really famous guy can grab ’em by?

Earth to Sullivan: Rachel Maddow always talks and talks and talks. The viewer's mind is always casting about in search of relief "about 10 minutes in." Many nights, it's only then that we finally learn what Maddow's topic is!

As we noted yesterday, listening to herself talk is Maddow's second favorite pastime. As we've often noted, her favorite pastime is playing old videotape of herself, generally in an attempt to help us learn to adore her more fully.

The Maddow Show is as close to a cult of personality as cable has ever produced. You could overlook the foolishness of this if Maddow was doing good journalism. But increasingly in recent years, she's been doing terrible journalism. In the past few days, for whatever reason, some people have finally noticed.

Paskin actually noted the "cynicism" of Maddow's gong-show this Tuesday. Colbert and Sullivan focused exclusively on the massive boredom involved.

On a journalistic basis, Maddow's presentation Tuesday night was typically ridiculous. She took an extremely minor piece of news and, mainly through a pair ofmisleading promotional tweets, turned it into a Very Big Huge Cable News Event.

The tiny droplets of news she dispensed actually tended to help Donald Trump. Due to her massive self-involvement, this thought probably hadn't entered her excited noggin when she conned the twittersphere into thinking Big News was approaching.

She turned a pro-Trump nothingburger into Tuesday Night's Only Topic. In the process, she managed to blow other, serious topics completely off the air.

Maddow's 13-week jihad in 2015 was about as strange a cable episode as we've ever seen. No one noticed! Through the rest of the 2016 campaign, she specialized in ducking every dangerous topic which helped defeat Candidate Clinton.

In the past few weeks, she's been peddling silly, embellished nonsense on a nightly basis. For some reason, Tuesday night took her gong-show over the line. People began to notice.

What has happened to Rachel Maddow over the years? The same thing that happened to Elvis! As our society had shown us again and again, enormous wealth and massive fame are very hard for many people to handle.

As the cult of Maddow has grown, its figurehead has steadily sunk toward the sea—but so what? Off-camera, her sycophants still laugh at her jokes; all traces of supervision are gone. Tomorrow, we'll give you one last example of how dumb this ridiculous program has been just in the past two weeks.

This dumbness is dangerous. It's dangerous when liberals accept a cult of personality from a self-adoring intellectual leader who mugs and clowns incessantly and seems to be losing touch.

We never thought we'd see the day when someone else would be willing to challenge the manifest greatness of Maddow. Career liberals have been tremendously irresponsible over the past twenty-five years when it comes to noting ridiculous conduct by big stars within the guild.

Their careerist self-dealing put Trump where he is. Willa Paskin for president!

Tomorrow: She does this night after night