LET’S PLAY DUMBBELL: Matthews’ alignment has changed since 1999!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2014

Part 3—The world-class dumbness remains: Has anyone ever dumbed the world down as much as Chris Matthews has?

In yesterday’s post, we recalled the disgraceful way he dumbed the world down back in the Clinton-Gore years.

Back then, Matthews was dumbing the mainstream press corps down. He did this in service to Jack Welch, his conservative near-billionaire corporate owner.

By coincidence, his salary went from $1 million to $5 million as he provided this service.

Matthews was quite influential back then, when there were many fewer cable “news” programs. At the time, his most reliable stooge was Newsweek’s Howard Fineman.

Today, Matthews has been repurposed. Today, he’s dumbing the liberal world down, with the help of trusted companions like Salon’s repurposed Joan Walsh.

Consider two programs Matthews did last week concerning the state of health reform. On each occasion, Walsh was there to assist in the dumbing.

On April 3, so was Michelle Bernard. In each case, the dumbness was almost overwhelming, as is the norm on Hardball.

News flash: Thanks to Matthews and others at his channel, cable viewers now have two stupendously stupid portraits of the world to choose from. At times, Matthews can almost make Fox look like the less stupid choice.

On April 3, Matthews was assisted by Walsh and Bernard. As the segment began, he played tape of several Republicans raising a fairly obvious question about the current status of the ACA:
MATTHEWS (4/3/14): For months, conservative critics have predicted the total failure of the president’s health care law. So when the president announced this week the law had enrolled over seven million people into the health care exchanges, did they react with some humility or at least some acceptance? Not quite.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
VAN SUSTEREN: You have said “cooking the books,” the administration. Do you stand by that?
BARRASSO: I do. We still don’t know how many people who have gone to the Web site to sign up actually paid.

JINDAL: We don’t even know what those numbers mean. We don’t know how many of those folks actually paid the premiums.

CRUZ: Well, look, the numbers are a bit of funny math, because they’re giving you numbers of who signed up. Those numbers don’t reflect, number one, who actually bought insurance and paid their first month’s premium.

GOHMERT: And now there are more lies coming out today. Seven million, which they clearly haven’t hit, because we’re hearing that maybe 25 percent, if that, have actually paid for their policies. It won’t end up being seven million today, when we get the truth. And it may be like Benghazi. It may be another year-and-a-half before we actually get the truth.
(END VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEWS: Benghazi! What did that have to do with anything?

(LAUGHTER)
The highlighted statements by Barasso, Jindal and Cruz are all perfectly accurate, of course. Even the highlighted statement by Gohmert is probably accurate.

But Matthews never showed any sign of knowing what these fellows were talking about. He made no attempt to address or answer any of the basic questions which are being widely asked about the current status of reform.

Instead, Matthews toyed with Gohmert’s reference to Benghazi, and with Rush Limbaugh’s reference to the Obama “regime.”

As he continued, Matthews dropped the T-bomb on a bunch of people who had made perfectly accurate statements concerning health care enrollment. In the modern cable world, this is how liberals get dumb:
MATTHEWS: What can you say about these guys, besides they are health care enrollment truthers right now?

Joan Walsh is editor at large at Salon and an MSNBC political analyst, and Michelle Bernard is the president of the Bernard Center for Women.

Thank you, Joan. First of all, the lingo: “regime.”
Matthews and Walsh discussed what it means when Rush uses the word “regime.” Walsh announced “a new form of birtherism,” then made this sad attempt to discuss health care enrollment:
WALSH: They are—they’re sore losers. It’s sour grapes politics. And it’s crazy. It’s Joe Wilson times 1,000, right? Joe Wilson screams, "You lie." This is just another, many, many, many more versions of "You lie."

And the thing that is so hilarious—I mean, if it wasn’t sad, it would be hilarious—is that these guys, you know, they loved the numbers when the administration was admitting that, in October and November, those numbers were low.

MATTHEWS: Oh, they were real numbers.

WALSH: They were real numbers.

MATTHEWS: Right.

(LAUGHTER)

WALSH: Those numbers were real numbers. But now the numbers can’t be trusted. They’re liars! They’re cooking the books!
That whole exchange is so dumb it squeaks, as anyone can see.

Everybody understands the (legitimate) questions, complaints and concerns about current enrollment figures. Unless they watch Hardball, that is, in which case the gods of cable “news” will work quite hard to get them completely dumbed down.

As everyone knows, Barrasso, Jindal and Cruz were raising a legitimate, widely-made point about the new enrollment figures. In fact, we don’t know how many of the 7.1 million will end up paying for their insurance. And we don’t know how many of those people are newly insured.

Overwrought rhetoric to the side, those are legitimate questions about the current state of enrollment. And those questions have been asked by a wide range of people, not just by Republicans.

But so what? On Thursday night’s Hardball, no effort was ever made to address or answer such questions. At no point did anyone indicate that these are legitimate questions at all.

Viewers were shown a range of Republicans making a perfectly accurate statement. In fact, we don’t know how many of the 7.1 million enrollees are actually going to pay.

After that, viewers were told that asking this question meant that the people in question were “health care enrollment truthers.” And just like that, it fell to Bernard to play her role in this game.

As recently as 2008, Bernard was still head of the Independent Women’s Forum, a major conservative group.

At that time, Bernard was being brought on Hardball to praise Candidate Obama and to help Matthews trash and insult Hillary Clinton. Matthews never asked why the head of the IWF was praising Obama so.

Today, Bernard is brought on Hardball to make speeches like the one which follows. Basically, she’s brought on Hardball so she can drop the bomb:
MATTHEWS: What is it about these people like Karl Rove running around election night with Megyn Kelly saying, “Oh, no, Iowa has been won,” like Baghdad Bob over there when we were invading. I didn’t like the war, but Baghdad Bob wasn’t exactly good on the facts on the ground.

These people, what is it? What is it, Michelle? This I don’t believe.

BERNARD: I said it off air and I’ll say it again right now. They are angry because this is an African American man and he is succeeding. They didn’t like him being elected the first time. They didn’t like him being elected the second time. He stands for so much that a marginalized Republican Party does not like.

And here is the dirty little secret, I think, why we continue to see them on this megaphone that “it’s a lie, it’s a lie, it’s a lie”—a lot of the people who are going to benefit from, quote/unquote, “Obamacare” are probably low-income, red-state Republican whites who are going to look up ten years from now and who are going to say, “This has made my life better.” So, maybe the mantra that I have grown up hearing about "big government is bad" might not be truthful. And maybe the Democratic Party is more appealing because it has made my life better. My wife can get treatment for breast cancer. I can get treatment.
Obama calls it Obamacare too, though Bernard is still nursing that grievance.

Truly, Bernard has come a long way from her days as the head of the IWF. But then, very few players on Hardball are still the people they formerly were.

Can we discuss the dumbing?

For starters, Rove didn’t say, “Oh, no, Iowa has been won,” on election night. In fact, he didn’t say anything like that. That’s just one of the many tales which now get fed to us liberal rubes as our corporate “cable news” channel copies the methods of Fox.

No, Rove didn’t say that. But Bernard knew how to answer her host’s central question. Why are Republicans saying that we don’t know what the real enrollment figures are?

Why else? They’re saying it because they’re racists!

Never mind that many other people are asking the very same questions and saying the very same things. This answer was preordained. It’s designated propaganda for gullible pseudo-liberals.

Matthews did two segments last week about the new sign-up figure. Walsh assisted on each of these occasions.

No attempt was ever made to discuss the facts of the case. That said, the facts of the case have never mattered on Hardball.

The facts didn’t matter in 1999; the facts don’t matter today. The only thing that has ever mattered is the process of dumbing us down, in line with the prevailing desires of the current owners who pay that $5 million per year.

What are the current facts of the case concerning health care enrollment? For one approach, consider this:

On Monday night, Ari Melber guest-hosted for Chris Hayes. He started the program with the “good news,” or at least so he said:
MELBER (4/7/14): There is some important new survey data out today from Gallup. It’s not about politics, but it could have some major implications for politics and the public interest.

The data is about how many people have health care in the U.S., and it’s good news. Gallup is reporting today that the percentage of Americans who do not have health insurance has fallen to its lowest rate since 2008. It fell from a high of 18 percent to about 15.6 percent.

In the first three months of this year, the countdown to the ACA deadline, the rate of the uninsured fell 1.5 points.
And Gallup measures in points but let’s look in terms of people. That’s 3.5 million people getting health care. So, that’s a snapshot of independent data.

Back in Washington, you may remember President Obama, of course, just announced that more than 7 million Americans signed up for health care before the ACA’s March 31st deadline. That took a while and included plenty of mistakes, but the ultimate number surpassed the Obama administration’s goal, and that’s just the new private markets. Another 3 million more gained insurance coverage through Medicaid and 3 million more than that have new coverage through their parents’ coverage.
Gallup isn’t the ultimate word in these matters. And the process of enrollment continues, as it will for years.

That said, Melber’s “good news” was this: our level of insurance is almost where it was in 2008! He went on to rattle a bunch of data, all of which you can see analyzed in this post by Glenn Kessler.

(According to Kessler, the number of young adults who have gained insurance by staying on their family’s plan may be less than one million. He says only one third of the 7.1 million may be “newly insured.” For ourselves, we have no idea what the real numbers are, in large part because we watch MSNBC.)

Is it good news when we learn that insurance levels are back to their level from 2008? We’re not sure how to assess that, though it seems a bit underwhelming at first glance.

But on The One True Liberal Channel, you’ll be dumbed within an inch of your life. As on Fox, so too on MSNBC:

You’ll be relentlessly propagandized, in highly predictable ways. You’ll be told that the news is good, and that the folks in the other tribe are a bunch of truthers and racists.

A person can get very dumb watching the Fox News Channel. But today, there are two major ways to get very dumb. Today, you can also get very dumb watching Matthews and Walsh.

Matthews’ alignment has changed since 1999. The world-class dumbness remains.

Tomorrow: Matthews attempts to discuss the Mastro report

A world of constant change: Cable news is a land of constant change. At the end of Thursday’s segment, the change in Bernard was noted:
MATTHEWS: Joan, you’re great, as always.

WALSH: Thank you.

MATTHEWS: And I got to go. But Joan Walsh, thank you. I mean that with high honor.

Michelle Bernard, thank you for coming. You are moving left! You are moving left!

I detected you over the years. Look at her smiling! She knows that! You’re coming into the corner.
In fact, Bernard reinvented herself a long time ago. For some reason, Chris called it out last week.

Bernard became a sudden Hardball regular in early 2008. Though she headed a major conservative group at the time, she was gushing in praise of Obama.

Chris kept forgetting to ask her why. Many things go unexplained on cable.

30 comments:

  1. This post is why I follow Bob Somerby. He's one of the few partisans on either side who bluntly call out other partisans on their own side when they're wrong.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In the face of corporate partisan script, we can count on Somerby to shine the light on those who churn tribal pleasing cant.

      Delete
    2. Love it. I'll admit to believing that because of the stupidity on the left, surpassing the stupidity on the right, we're a doomed nation, but in addition to enlightening, Bob never fails to also amuse, so there is that.

      Delete
    3. Plus churn is his favorite verb. That's one way to spot the sock puppets.

      Delete
    4. Trolls who mimic Somerby's style are not sockpuppets, except of each other.

      Delete
  2. I am sad to know Chris is still making $5 million. I would have hoped after TDH demonstrated how he almost got somebody killed in 1999,
    and slimed Hillary and Al Gore, after which which TDH he got that big raise.

    I couldn't help thinking of all the money Rachel is shoving into her pants as she snarks and frets her way across the stage.

    She too is dumbing the nation way down as she stuffs big bucks in her pants.


    Joan Walsh is empty, daft, perhaps a tiny smidgeon corrupt—and she runs with a whole gang of friends! She affirmed the New York Times piece on dressage, thereby pleasing our empty heads and stuffing more dough in her pants.

    They’re stuffing millions of bucks in their pants.

    But where does Chris stuff his? I look forward to the TDH post where this mystery is resolved.

    KZ

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Matthews was quite influential back then."

    How influential was he? Is he more or less influential now?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. He shows up regularly on Bill Maher's show, taking up space as a liberal voice that might be better represented by someone with real commitment to liberal values, and better able to articulate the support for them.

      Delete
    2. Does Mr. Maher's comedy show select guests by measuring their "real commitment" to some set of values?

      Do you think his appearances make his less influential now than back in "real time?" And how influential was he then?

      Bob doesn't say. How influential is "quite"?

      Delete
    3. No. His invites as a guest liberal are a measure of his current influence. I think he is a sick joke, then and now. I think we need better public liberals.

      Delete
    4. His invites to Maher's show are a measure of his current influence?

      Oh my word!

      Delete
    5. "He shows up regularly on Bill Maher's show"

      Let's examine this claim, shall we?

      According to this list of Maher's guest from the world's foremost authority on everything, Mattews has been on Maher's show nine times in 14 seasons, and some 314 episodes and counting.

      His latest appearance was last October.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Real_Time_with_Bill_Maher_episodes

      Delete
  5. By the way - does anybody have a date (even an approximate one) when blogger re-purposed himself as a junkyard dog attacking liberals?

    I think it has to be around the time when the sickening locution "we liberals" started appearing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We don't know.

      It could have been last Thursday, June 32nd, in the year of our Real Time, 1999.

      If someone had changed the code on Somerby before Y2K this might not have happened. Somebody bungled it. But it could have been a good faith mistake.

      Delete
  6. If we are back to 2008 levels of insurance instead of showing greater improvement, perhaps it is because the jobs after the financial collapse may have included health insurance as a benefit whereas the new jobs added, primarily low wage and in the service/retail sector, do not come with health insurance. So, the jobs replaced have brought us back to 2008 levels but without good benefits or higher salaries, and the gap has been made up by the ability to buy insurance through the exchanges. Just speculation. I agree that it would be nice to know what is happening.

    I do think it is inappropriate for those Republicans to refer to the administration as liars when they are simply repeating a different statistic than the one critics would prefer to hear -- the number who have signed up rather than the number who have paid their premiums. It is unreasonable to expect the latter when the signup deadline is so recent and people may not have been billed yet.

    Why couldn't Matthews have addressed the substance instead of the tone of the Republican comments? Maybe for the same reason that people in these comments so rarely address the substance of Somerby's posts, and instead focus on the tone (or extraneous details). It is much harder work to criticize someone based on substance -- relatively easy to criticize based on superficialities.

    ReplyDelete
  7. RAND study: By our estimate, 3.9 million people signed up for ObamaCare, not 7.1 million like the White House says

    A caveat right off the bat: RAND’s estimate only runs through March 28 whereas the actual deadline for signing up was March 31st. Given the crush of traffic on Healthcare.gov in late March, many more people could have signed up over those last three days than were captured by these numbers. On the other hand, the White House was claiming six million sign-ups as of March 27. There’s no way to reconcile that with RAND’s data.

    http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/08/rand-study-by-our-estimate-3-9-million-people-signed-up-for-obamacare-not-7-1-million-like-the-white-house-says/

    Who here believes the White House figure? And, if you don't believe it, does it bother you that the current White House lacks credibility?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It doesn't bother me that you think hotair.com has any credibility.

      Delete
    2. I believe the White House figure.

      Delete
    3. This numbers business sounds like a job for Darrell Issa.

      Delete
    4. Doesn't the phrase "by our estimate" bother you? It suggests that Rand was not actually counting the signups, whereas the White House presumably has access to harder numbers.

      Delete
    5. Actually the real deadline to enroll in Obamacare is April 15. I have gotten 3 emails from healthcare.gov telling me this (because I created an account but did not purchase, I purchased directly from the insurance company because the site was too malfunctiony).

      Delete
  8. 1. You're in trouble when you start treating Glenn Kessler's declarations as gospel. He tries, I'm sure, but arguably he's infected with the Beltway Disease: both sides do it, and equally. That is not a legitimate starting point, and that's what it is for him.

    2. "Is it good news when we learn that insurance levels are back to their level from 2008? We’re not sure how to assess that, though it seems a bit underwhelming at first glance." This is an astoundingly stupid statement. Anyone who has followed the health insurance issue knows that there had been a long-term decline in employer-based coverage even before 2008. That is the year the crisis hit, and there was a massive drop with a massive increase in unemployment. We are not anywhere close to the employment rate we had before the crisis, and the percentage of those employed who had health insurance through their employer was already dropping. For the percentage insured to have reached the level before the Great Recession is enormous good news. What's different? ACA, and only ACA.

    3. Let's not forget who politicized these numbers first. The estimates of how many people would sign up came from the CBO. The numbers have come close to the CBO estimates for the first year. There is no reason to disbelieve the CBOs estimate of large increases for subsequent years. End of story for anyone acting in good faith. But not for Republicans, who simply ignore the undeniable fact that ACA was their plan. So now Democrats see the best news they can find to support a plan that should, in fact, have received bipartisan support. But since it was adopted by Obama in the naive belief that a bipartisan plan would receive that bipartisan support, it must be opposed with whatever crap can be dreamed up to throw against the wall. At this stage, it is disputing the precision of numbers that are irrelevant to a good faith public policy discussion. This sequence is beyond serious dispute. There is nothing tribal about it.

    ReplyDelete
  9. This figure was early and was misinterpreted. Rand now estimates a net gain due to ACA of 9.3 million as of March 31. There will be more Medicaid sign-ups during the year.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 4.5 million of the 9.3 million are through Medicaid

      Delete
  10. So, to what extent is The Daily Howler holding those on the right, and their friendly mouthpieces in the mainstream press, accountable for the irresponsible, widespread panic they tried to induce in the Country about the vast, horrific disaster the Obamacare rollout was? Judged against these pronouncements, how well is Obamacare doing?
    And is it just possible the rush to judgement on the rollout made it easier for the press to ignore the Republican shutdown of the Government, and how much that might have cost the country in dollars and cents? I guess it's just UNTHINKABLE the Press wanted to help the Republicans change the subject. That would be like saying something is up with there blackout on the current state of Bagdad.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Has it been journalistically verified that anyone claims they have checked Bob's screws and they have been tightened since 1999?

    ReplyDelete
  12. Somerby:

    BARRASSO: I do. We still don’t know how many people who have gone to the Web site to sign up actually paid.

    JINDAL: We don’t even know what those numbers mean. We don’t know how many of those folks actually paid the premiums.

    CRUZ: Well, look, the numbers are a bit of funny math, because they’re giving you numbers of who signed up. Those numbers don’t reflect, number one, who actually bought insurance and paid their first month’s premium.

    GOHMERT: And now there are more lies coming out today. Seven million, which they clearly haven’t hit, because we’re hearing that maybe 25 percent, if that, have actually paid for their policies. It won’t end up being seven million today, when we get the truth. And it may be like Benghazi. It may be another year-and-a-half before we actually get the truth.
    (END VIDEOTAPE)

    MATTHEWS: Benghazi! What did that have to do with anything?

    (LAUGHTER)

    The highlighted statements by Barasso, Jindal and Cruz are all perfectly accurate, of course. Even the highlighted statement by Gohmert is probably accurate.

    ----------------------------------------------------------

    Well, insurance companies have been reporting about 15% have not been paying their premiums. So Somerby is wrong when he defends those statements. Somerby implies that Gohmert's highlighted statement is the most questionable by using the word "even", but actually that highlighted statement is clearly the most accurate (the rest of Gohmert's quote is ridiculous).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Does Bob not find it odd that the all four Republicans are repeating exactly the same "talking point"? Nope, to him, it is all very "reasonable."

      Well, how reasonable is it?

      When Christmas sales figures are reported, has anybody asked how many people have made credit card payments?

      When auto sales figures are reported, do we wonder how many will make their loan payments?

      When housing sales figures are reported, do we wonder how many will pay off their mortgages?

      Nope, instead of recognizing spin when it slaps him in the face we get this from our intrepid media analyst:

      "Even the highlighted statement by Gohmert is probably accurate."

      Yes, Bob. Gohmert was "probably accurate" when he called the figures "lies," and when he said "it may be like Benghazi."

      Or this corker: ". . . because we’re hearing that maybe 25 percent, if that, have actually paid for their policies."

      Hearing from whom? Are we to believe that 75 percent of the people who signed up for health insurance had absolutely no intention of paying their premiums?

      Apparently, we must if we are also to believe, as Somerby is quick to tell us, that Gohmert's statement is "probably accurate."





      Delete
  13. "Instead, Matthews toyed with Gohmert’s reference to Benghazi, and with Rush Limbaugh’s reference to the Obama “regime.”

    Yes, nobody who parses words like that, then uses them as a club to beat on their chosen targets should ever be trusted to tell the truth.

    ReplyDelete