RIDICULOUS US: Our own rogues gallery of prime-time hosts!

FRIDAY, JUNE 23, 2017

Part 4—Much loved by Ridiculous Us: All around the globe, wherever such groups have performed, lynch mobs have sometimes stampeded off in pursuit of a guilty party.

That doesn't mean they weren't lynch mobs, with all the moral and intellectual squalor which serve to distinguish such groups.

At present, a group of this type is chasing Donald J. Trump around. In our view, they're chasing a deeply disordered, dangerous party who shouldn't be where he is.

That doesn't mean that they aren't a mob conducting an old-fashioned chase.

Our press corps has staged several such chases in the past twenty-five years. This time, they're chasing a "guilty party." But they're still behaving like a mob, as they did when they were chasing Clinton, Clinton and Gore.

Case in point—our own "cable news," last night.

Yesterday, the Republican leadership in the Senate released its health care proposal. By common assessment, tens of millions fewer people will have health care in the future if the bill ends up passing, as it very well might.

Last night, on liberal cable, this rather large problem took a back seat to an entertaining chase. We'll call it The Hardy Boys and the Case of the Grandfather Clock. In that title, we refer to the conversation which took place in the shadow of that grandfather clock.

When he testified before the Senate last month, James B. Comey kept referring to the grandfather clock, which is found in the Oval Office. Pundits praised him at that time for his magnificent narrative skill. They said his inclusion of such detail suggested that he was right about pretty much everything else.

That foolishness was part of the chase. So were some of the conversations on liberal cable last night.

Before the pundits could talk about health care last night, they had to talk about Donald J. Trump's newest revelation. No, he didn't have audiotape of his conversations with Comey the God, the president had finally said.

This distraction returned the pundits to The Case of the Grandfather Clock. Nancy Drew was also present, in the person of Nicolle Wallace, guest-hosting for Brian Williams on The 11th Hour.

Wallace opened the show with a segment about Trump's non-existent tapes. After a panel of hanging judges all said all the mandated things, she went to her first break at 11:13, saying this:

WALLACE (6/22/17): Thank you Jeremy Bash, Michael Crowley and Mieke Eoyang.

Coming up, reaction to all this from a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Jeff Merkley joins us in studio, next.

And later, the Republican health care bill is out and there's already enough resistance to kill it, from Republicans. The 11th Hour is back after this.

Yay yay yay yay yay! The health care bill was already on the way down! But first, we were going to discuss Donald Trump's tapes some more! The tapes were entertaining and fun. As every overpaid pundit knows, health care discussions are boring!

That's the way our own cable works in the hands of a Republican host. (Wallace was communications director in the Bush White House. She's long been excellent as a cable news guest, is improving as a host.)

In fairness, Wallace turned to health care fairly quickly when she spoke with Merkley. That said, the Case of the Grandfather Clock came first. It was the lead on The 11th Hour, and it produced a scripted conversation, part of the ongoing chase.

Needless to say, the conversation involved speculation about Trump's original motives for suggesting he had those tapes. Also, the conversation involved the chance that Trump's suggestion meant that he had maybe perhaps committed obstruction of justice.

Yay yay yay yay yay yay! Wallace's trio of pundits wondered whether Trump had meant to intimidate Comey the God by suggesting he had tapes, or whether he meant to threaten him. We liberals were given those choices on Our Own Partisan Cable. No other possibilities needed to apply.

Here on our sprawling campus, our analysts were somewhat puzzled. They wondered how Comey could have been kept from making accurate statements about his conversations with Trump by the possibility that a tape of those conversations might exist.

Of one thing the youngsters could feel quite sure. They would hear no suggestion that Trump's suggestion about the tapes kept Comey, or his "associates," from making inaccurate statements about those conversations.

As we noted last week, it can almost seems that some such thing actually may have occurred. Before Trump made his remark about tapes, "associates" of Comey were insisting that Comey had never told Trump that he wasn't under investigation. These insistent, false statements came to an end after Trump suggested he might have tapes.

We liberals aren't forced to hear such facts on our own partisan channel. The channel exists to make us feel happy at night, and to make plenty of money for the corporate owners, just like over on Fox.

Last night, on liberal cable, we were thereby enjoying the fun of the chase. On The 11th Hour, facts about health care took second place, just as it ever has been, for the past dozens of years.

Meanwhile, over on Fox, people were hearrng different topics discussed. As we flipped back and forth, in sheer boredom, to Tucker Carlson Tonight, we were struck by the topics our fellow citizens were hearing discussed Over There.

The first time we flipped over, Joe Concha was telling Tucker that MSNBC and CNN had refused to broadcast Donald J. Trump's speech the previous night. We think their decision made perfect sense, but Concha was bringing some heat.

They talk about Trump almost all the time, Concha said, offering data which are garbled in the Nexis transcript. But they refuse to air him live! He then offered these remarks:

CONCHA (6/22/17): So when you are so myopic on a particular person, in this case the president, why wouldn't you cover him live to actually hear what he has to say? Unless that unfiltered version of Trump doesn't allow for commentary, punditry, or maybe speculation around their latest bombshell that came via unnamed sources.

So then we talk about the business end of this...How did the ratings work out? Was this a good editorial decision by CNN and MSNBC not to cover this rally live as Fox did?

I have the numbers in front of me. Fox more than quadrupled CNN's audience during live coverage at 8 PM Eastern last night.

Total audience: Fox 3.3 million, CNN 821,000. Against MSNBC: Fox 3.3 million, MSNBC 1.53 million.

Fox had conquered again, the channel's viewers were told. They were also told that MSNBC won't cover Donald J. Trump except to speculate about their latest anonymous bombshell.

Sadly, there's an element of truth to that.

The next time we flipped over, Carlson was battering an immigration attorney about the claim that immigrants can't receive welfare benefits in their first five years in the country.

Carlson said this liberal claim is grossly misleading, to the point of basically being wrong; he seemed to go into some detail. We can't tell you if he was right, but neither could the attorney!

We flipped again, and Fox viewers were being told about a professor at Trinity University, Carlson's alma mater. Let's just say that this professor may have gone Kathy Griffin one better:

CARLSON: Several days ago, shortly after House majority whip Steve Scalise and four others were shot down on a baseball field outside of D.C., a sociology professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut went onto social media to applaud the violence.

His name is [NAME WITHHELD]; he is a professor there. He linked to an article on Facebook that argued Congressman Scalise should have been left to bleed to death on the field. Here's part of what he wrote:

Quote, "It is past time for the racially oppressed to do what people who believe themselves to be white will not do. Put an end to the vectors of their destructive methodology of whiteness in their white supremacy system."

And then [NAME WITHHELD] added this. "Let them EFFING die." He spelled that out. In a later post, Williams referred to white people as, quote, "inhuman." Whoa!

He still works there. Forced by news reports to respond to all this, the president of the college, Joanne Berger-Sweeney, issued a statement saying the school will look into [his] post...

We haven't researched the incident, but let's face it. Someone within our liberal tents is always creating a moment like this. Over on our own cable channel, we aren't required to know or think about this.

The last time we flipped, Tucker was discussing Kamala Harris with Asra Nomani, the very sane-seeming co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. That segment started like this:

CARLSON: Just last week, California Senator Kamala Harris became a feminist mantra by persisting in her questioning of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. But the day later, Harris had an actual chance to help actual women and she took a big pass on that.

Asra Nomani and Ayaan Hirsi Ali appear before the Senate Homeland Security Committee to testify about the dangers of Islamic extremism, particularly for women. They have experience those dangers, first hand, both of them.

Senator Harris, who sits on the committee, didn't have a single question for them, nor did Senators Heidi Heitkamp and Claire McCaskill, the other Democratic women on the committee. Why the silence? Asra Nomani joins us tonight.

NOMANI: Thank you, Tucker.

CARLSON: Thank you for coming on. You wrote a powerful piece today in the New York Times in which you said that not only did these purported feminists in the Senate ignore you, an actual woman who has suffered under Sharia law. But one of them, Claire McCaskill questioned the reason for the hearing in the first place and in effect scolded you by implication for complaining about it.

NOMANI: Yes. We were shocked.

We don't know what actually happened, but the segment proceeded from there. Again, Nomani seemed extremely sane. Her New York Times column is here.

This was occurring on Fox. Over on our own cable channel, we were enjoying the chase. Over There, on Carlson's show, The Others were hearing the types of things we rarely hear discussed.

At issue, on each channel, was our nation's greatest current challenge. That's the challenge of dealing with the Us-and-Them which is being created by corporate cable, by talk radio and by the partisan Net.

At present, each team is making millions of dollars offering the pleasing porridge one group or the other enjoys. On our pwn liberal channel, a rogues gallery of cable hosts is conducting the chase in prime time.

Their names are shown below. One party has been excused:

Our own prime-time rogues gallery:
6 PM: Greta
7 PM: Chris Matthews
8 PM: [Excused absence]
9 PM: A certain unnamed cable star
10 PM: Lawrence O'Donnell
11 PM: Brian

For several years, when she worked at Fox, Greta was the prime enabler of Donald J. Trump's birtherism. A certain unnamed cable host swears by Great's manifest greatness, says she's her drinking pal.

In the late 1990s, Matthews was perhaps the craziest, most influential player in the hunt against the Clintons and against Candidate Gore, the crazy chase which sent George W. Bush to the White House.

Matthews' behavior was crazy and crazily dishonest for years. A certain unnamed cable host tells us how great he is, and how great a friend!

Lawrence and Brian also played key roles in that crazy, death-dealing chase after Gore. They were being paid at the time by their zillionaire conservative corporate owner, General Electric CEO Jack Welch.

Night after night, Bran ranted and complained about Gore's deeply troubling clothes. Years later, he got canned for making stupid shit up. Lawrence has had to apologize to virtually everyone on the face of the earth, not excluding Donald J. Trump.

The gods must rock with laughter each night, watching this gang of corporate con men hosting on liberal cable. People are dead all over the world because of what Matthews, Williams and O'Donnell did in the twenty-month War Against Gore. Greta played the fool for years, helping Donald J. Trump pimp his birther madness.

An unnamed cable host praises them all. When Trump announced in June 2015, she weirdly assured us that she had nothing against him.

At the same time, she has run from every consequential tribal fight during the eight years of her multimillion-dollar corporate employment. When Comey went after Candidate Clinton last July, he had little to fear from the likes of this car salesman clown.

Last night, we liberals enjoyed the porridge this rogues gallery served. So it has gone for twenty-five years among the pitiful hapless group known as Ridiculous Us, a group best known for spectacular dumbness and, of course, for its tribal certainty that the very dumb and stupid ones can all be found Over There.

Tomorrow: Wonderfully unintentional humor: Completely Ridiculous This