Kasich watch: Five years ago, Kasich made a mistake!

MONDAY, APRIL 25, 2016

Maddow wants you to hate him for it: Five years ago, in May 2011, John Kasich, governor of Ohio, made an embarrassing mistake.

Kasich's mistake was so utterly trivial that virtually no one discussed it at the time. Two Fridays ago, Rachel Maddow used the trivial, five-year-old event as her first example in a poisonous display which she described as "our child's treasury of John Kasich engaging with women voters."

Five years later, Kasich's embarrassing, trivial error was dealt to us the rubes as part of a poisonous portrait of Kasich. We were being taught how to loathe The Other.

Warning! Because Kasich's mistake was so utterly pointless, it seems that no one ever developed any background material about it. The videotape of the incident seems to be rather truncated. At any rate, this is the way the whole thing went down, as shown by the poisonous Maddow:

MADDOW (4/15/16): John Kasich ran for state legislature in Ohio starting in the '70s. He won nine straight congressional races in Ohio. He won two governor races in Ohio. This is the second time he's running for president. And that is an impressive amount of experience.

It's marked him out as someone who has gone far in politics, given what tends to happen when he talks to people, or about them, particularly when those people are women. It doesn't have to be women but it's usually women.

Behold, happy Friday night! This is our child's treasury of John Kasich engaging with women voters.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KASICH: Is this your mom?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you serious?

KASICH: I didn't know. Oh, girl friend!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Definitely not kidding.

To watch Maddow's full segment, just click here. Warning! Probable brain cell loss!

Basically, this is what happened in this first incident from Rachel Maddow's aptly named "child's treasury of John Kasich." It happened five years ago:

A couple seems to have asked Governor Kasich if they could take a photograph with him. As they approached him for the photo, Kasich asked the rather young-looking man if the woman with him was his mom.

As it turned out, the woman in question was the young man's girl friend. The videotape is highly truncated, but it looks like folks were embarrassed.

You can watch the videotape here. It's part of a blog post which is five years old.

Five years later, Rachel Maddow thought you needed to see that videotape. She offered it as part of an opening segment in which she tried to help us rubes learn to hate Kasich more.

Make no mistake, and don't be a hack. Maddow's segment was designed to teach us to hate and loathe Kasich. Her basic theme in that opening segment was this:

Candidate Kasich says horrible things to and about women.

Does Kasich actually do that? We'll answer your question with a question. If Kasich behaves that way on a regular basis, why would Maddow have to go back five years to present an embarrassing but utterly pointless example like that? People, we're just asking!

Why did Kasich think the woman in question was the guy's mother? We'll take a guess. The guy in this incident looked very young. By conventional standards, the woman was substantially overweight. This may have made her look older.

At any rate, Kasich made the kind of mistake which counts as embarrassing in our culture. Five years later, Maddow used it as part of a poisonous segment designed to teach liberals to hate.

Consider a quick bit of background:

For the record, Candidate Kasich is a bit like Their Own Joe Biden. Each man comes from working-class roots. Each man's political persona is built around a type of non-stop "hail fellow well met" verbalizing which emphasizes his connection with regular people.

The word for these fellows is "garrulous." When you talk as much as these guys do, eventually things may come out wrong.

Biden has produced some awkward moments down through the years. Because Biden belongs to our tribe, propagandists like Maddow will treat such incidents as a sign of his good heart.

Kasich has produced some awkward moments too. On April 15, Maddow devoted the first segment of her show to an ugly goal—she tried to help us learn to hate Kasich for these scattered, largely trivial moments.

The incident we've discussed today happened five years back. Because it was so insignificant, virtually no one said anything about it at the time.

On April 15, it became the opening play in the recitation of horribles which Maddow described as "our child's treasury of John Kasich engaging with women voters." We think a person who plays it this way ought to be pulled off the air.

Maddow was working to make her liberal viewers stupid and ugly that night. Increasingly, this seems to be her program's principle play. Increasingly, her work is designed to take liberal viewers into the realm of prehistoric tribal sorting. In that realm, you can't simply oppose a public figure like Kasich. You have to see him as an evil example of Those People, the evil tribe found Over There.

Maddow's program has become a low-IQ rolling embarrassment. It's now a steady-stream purveyor of the hateful and dumb.

In the next few days, we'll show you more of what she did to help us learn to loathe Kasich that night. Maddow's work is now bad for the liberal soul. In a better, less corporate world, she'd no longer be on the air.