RED AND BLUE TOGETHER: What’s in a word?

MONDAY, JUNE 23, 2015

Part 1—Letting the glory out: Should Dylann Roof be described as a “terrorist?”

In less than a week, it has become conventional wisdom, within our blue tribe, that he should be so described.

For ourselves, we’re disinclined to agree. But then, we keep puzzling about the best way to “let the glory out.”

The fuller phrase comes from Edwin Markham. In the fuller phrase, we’re seeking the best way to “shake the soul and let the glory out.”

We’ll discuss the line as the week proceeds. As we start, let’s consider the level of reasoning we liberals are now willing to accept as we seek to move our great vision forward.

Should Roof be described as a terrorist? Without attempting to judge that question, consider a piece which appeared on the front page of the Outlook section in Sunday’s Washington Post.

The piece was written by Professor Butler, an associate professor at Penn. A slightly different version of the piece had appeared on line several days earlier, in the immediate aftermath of Wednesday night’s murders in Charleston.

To what standards should liberals and progressives hold journalists, news orgs and professors? We’ll start by stating a value judgment—we should hold these opinion leaders to standards which are high.

Alas! Increasingly, the liberal world seems eager to accept the academic and journalistic standards long associated with people like Rush and Sean. Apparently, the same is true of the Washington Post.

In Sunday’s hard-copy Outlook section, the professor’s piece started like this. Hard-copy headline included:

BUTLER (6/21/15): Is an accused killer called a terrorist? Not if he’s white.

Police are investigating the fatal shooting of nine African Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., as a hate crime committed by a white man. Unfortunately, it’s not a unique event in American history. Black churches have long been targets of white supremacists who burned and bombed them in an effort to terrorize the black communities those churches anchored. One of the most egregious terrorist acts in U.S. history was committed against a black church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. Four girls were killed when members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, a tragedy that ignited the civil rights movement.

But listen to major media outlets, and you won’t hear the word “terrorism” used in coverage of Wednesday’s shooting. You haven’t heard the white, male suspect, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, described as “a possible terrorist” by mainstream news organizations (though some, including The Washington Post, have covered the growing debate about this discrepancy). And if coverage of other recent shootings by white men is any indication, he never will be. Instead, the go-to explanation for his alleged actions will be mental illness. He will be humanized and called sick, a victim of mistreatment or inadequate mental health resources.

That narrative has formed quickly for Roof. Soon after his arrest Thursday, former FBI special agent Jonathan Gilliam appeared on CNN, saying that Roof probably “has some mental issues” and didn’t know he had done anything wrong. That is the power of whiteness in America.

Tell the truth! As of Sunday morning, had you seen a lot of people trying to “humanize” Roof?

For ourselves, we had not. That said, questions will almost surely arise about possible mental illness with Roof. In part, that will happen because it’s obviously possible that Roof may be mentally ill.

For ourselves, we haven’t seen a lot of attempts to “humanize” Roof. That said, we’re so old that we can remember when “mass murderer” was a term of disapprobation, with the notion that the killer had conducted a “hate crime” adding to the criticism.

That said, many liberals are saying that Roof should also be described as a “terrorist.” When Professor Butler voiced her complaint about the way he’s being described, she specifically noted that statement by Jonathan Gilliam, which she said reflected “the power of whiteness in America.”

We doubted that CNN had been working real hard to “humanize” Roof. We decided to take the traditional look at the record.

Jonathan Gilliam did say the words Professor Butler has quoted. He said them in the 2 PM hour on Thursday, June 18, the day after Roof committed his murders.

It isn’t entirely clear what Gilliam meant by his comment, which we’ll show you below. That said, we can’t say that the power of whiteness was performing any great favors for Roof this day, at least not on CNN.

Roof had been apprehended roughly three hours earlier. Gilliam was brought on midway through the hour to discuss the interrogation which was likely occurring.

Very little was known about Roof at this juncture. Was CNN trying to humanize Roof?

Not exactly. At the start of the hour, Martin Savidge and host John Berman engaged in this exchange:

BERMAN (6/18/15): And to be clear, what authorities tell us is that this suspect went into this church, he said he wanted to kill black people. That is what we were being told. He apparently also kept someone alive, we are told, because he wanted that witness to tell the world what had happened. It gives you a sense of just how diabolical they believe this suspect is.

SAVIDGE: That is—I mean that's—

When I read that, you, you literally do feel a sense of chill, of someone that would be cold and calculating and would make that kind of a statement and do that kind of an act. Which also, again, leads to why the authorities were so concerned what he might do next.

According to Berman, Roof was believed to be “diabolical.” According to Savidge, Roof’s actions had been so “cold and calculating” that he “literally felt a sense of chill” when he heard them described.

After speaking with Savidge, Berman introduced the Reverend Thomas Dixon, a Charleston minister. Even as the names of the victims began to emerge, Dixon described the killings by Roof as an “atrocity.”

He and Berman ended on this note:

DIXON: Was he alone in this? Do you think that there might have been another ulterior motive involved in this? That’s one of the prominent questions that’s being raised right now for myself. And all last night, it was the question of the hate crime.

I really—I couldn’t, I couldn’t address that issue until I had more facts. Now the facts that have come out today about his motives clearly says that this was all about hate of black people.

BERMAN: Reverend Thomas Dixon, thanks so much for being with us. Sometimes, you know, there’s no answer. Sometimes there’s just evil.

DIXON: Exactly. Thank you.

BERMAN: Reverend, appreciate it.

DIXON: Really appreciate you.

To diabolical, cold and calculating, we could now add “just evil.”

In his next segment, Berman introduced Bernice King, the daughter of Dr. King and CEO of the King Center. She sent her condolences “to all of the families that have been impacted by this horrific act.” She further said, “I really think this is a time that we have to begin to do serious examination in this nation to look at, you know, the issues of racism and hate and violence and what we may have—what we may be doing to create a culture of violence in this nation.”

Watching this program, Professor Butler somehow got it into her head that Roof was being “humanized” thanks to “the power of whiteness.” Or maybe she just decided to say that because it fit a script.

None of this speaks to the question with which we began, of course.

Should Dylann Roof be described as a “terrorist?” We wouldn’t be inclined to describe him that way, although there’s a lot of information about his influences which ought to be shared with the public, preferably in ways which will encourage people to listen.

For ourselves, we wouldn’t be inclined to describe him that way. But then, we’re actively looking for the best way to let the glory out.

We’ve seen some things in the past few days that we’ve very much liked. Yesterday, we saw so-called black and white (and brown) together—but we also saw red and blue together, which strikes us as a potentially glorious sight.

Here’s the question we’ll ask this week—what’s the best route to progress? Adopting the intellectual standards of Rush and Sean strikes us as a bad idea.

By the way, just so you’ll know, Roof had been “humanized” earlier that day on CNN, during the 10 AM hour.

Roof’s name had just been released. Carol Costello spoke with Michaela Angela Davis, who repeatedly characterized him as a terrorist:

COSTELLO (6/18/15): I want to bring in writer and cultural critic Michaela Angela Davis. Thanks so much for being with me. You know, we always try to make sense of these things but this one just—

DAVIS: Carol, really, unfortunately, we’ve seen this historically. This isn’t something that we cannot fathom. You know, if people who follow American history can fathom it—we don't like to, but there is a trajectory of historic, domestic terrorism. He’s a terrorist, taking photos, putting himself up with the Rhodesian flag which to South Africans is the same as, you know, the Confederate flag to us. It triggers—

COSTELLO: And you can see those pictures of him that are on Twitter right now. CNN has not confirmed that but he does apparently have these patches of these flags.

DAVIS: Yes. And it’s not a selfie. It is a portrait that was on Facebook that clearly show some symbolism that also signifies that he's connected with supremist ideology.

COSTELLO: So he goes into this church. People are praying.

DAVIS: He prays with them.

COSTELLO: He prays with them. He’s there for an hour, and then he stands up and says "I want to shoot black people?" It’s just—

DAVIS: You know, unfortunately, this helps to legitimize when people are saying—this is a civil rights moment. We are being under attack. We have not healed as a country. We have not resolved our brutal history. This is it. This is what this looks like. This is what real hate crimes are. This is what real terrorism is.

This is what our parents— I talked to my mother this morning, she was speechless. They listen to (INAUDIBLE). This is it. This is the life. This is the life that many Americans, black and white, live. It's terrorism. And he is a terrorist. And this is a massacre.

COSTELLO: So police are still looking for him now. They came out, the mayor of Charleston also came out and expressed his disgust for this individual and said they were going to hunt him down and, you know, charge him with the most serious offenses and do everything they can. Are the authorities handling this properly?

DAVIS: You know, the optics are very different. You know, this terrorist killed more people than the Boston bombing, right? We know what those streets looked like. We knew what the streets of Ferguson looked like with tanks and people in riot gear. And so this is not lost to, you know, folks that are following this, the difference and the optics.

I don’t want to see tanks on anybody’s streets but are we clear that it’s on lockdown? Are we clear that our children are being protected? Are we clear that there’s a terrorist on the loose?

This kind of languaging and framing of what is happening here can look different than how, say, again Boston, which we all know was terrorist and a massacre was framed. So there’s a lot of optics, a lot of history, there’s a lot of triggers, particularly this church and particularly this leader.

Was it an assassination? Because it seems very strategic, very calculated, very clear goals from this terrorist.

Davis went on at length, as was perfectly reasonable. She continued to humanize Roof by describing his “gruesome” acts.

By Sunday morning, a Penn professor and the Washington Post were telling you that this conversation didn’t occur. That CNN had actually been trying to humanize poor little Roof.

Our best guess? This probably isn’t a winning way to let the glory out.

This is how Sean and Rush have worked. Do we want to follow them there?

Tomorrow: What James Clyburn said

Gilliam’s fuller statement: During CNN’s 2 o’clock hour, Roof was described as “diabolical.” He was so “cold and calculating” that he literally gave Savidge a chill.

Roof was “just evil,” Berman said. The Reverend Dixon agreed.

Roof had been humanized in these ways before Gilliam was interviewed by CNN’s Ana Cabrera. This is the Q-and-A from which Professor Butler cherry-picked the “evidence” which drove her masterful scholarly theme:

CABRERA (6/18/15): Joining me now to discuss this investigation moving forward...former FBI special agent Jonathan Gilliam.

Jonathan, I want to start with you, because we just heard the police chief talk about what’s going to be an interrogation process that’s about to play out. Walk us through what that might be like.

GILLIAM: So it’s important to understand what interrogation is versus interviewing. When I interview you, I’m trying to collect some information. I’m not changing the environment that you’re in at all. When we take you in and we interrogate you, we are putting you in a sterile environment and we’re trying to create an environment that we can handle and we can manipulate.

And so what’s going on with this individual now is that you have multiple officers in and around him coming in and out of the room or talking to him and handling him and trying to, you know, really, you’d be very surprised, put him at ease so that he feels comfortable to talk to you. It’s not like in the movies, necessarily, where you have the good cop/bad cop. This is something really where you have to build a trust between you and this individual who has done a heinous thing, but you have to build a trust, if possible, so that you can get the information that you need. And you also need to make them aware of what they’ve done, especially somebody who probably, in this case, has some mental issues, if you can, convince them of what they’ve done wrong so that they’ll—the guilt side will eventually come out and they’ll confess.

The professor cherry-picked that “evidence” to pimp her script along.

The Washington Post chose to publish her piece in a high-profile spot. We’ve seen Rush and Sean perform that same way for a good many years.

Just for the record, Gilliam had described Roof in yet another way during CNN’s 10 A.M. hour. Even before Davis came on, he described him as a specific type of “terrorist.”

We’re just saying! You can just click here.

Supplemental: Chris Matthews was almost describing himself!

MONDAY, JUNE 22, 2015

Dan Abrams on Lord of the Flies: The analysts came out of their chairs last week when Chris Matthews described Donald Trump.

Matthews offered his description on last Monday’s Maddow Show. As we noted this morning, this was the first thing he said:

MATTHEWS (6/15/15): Well, [Trump is] kind of a comic book figure. I mean, if you imagine in a Superman or better yet a Batman comic episode, he would be “Downtown Developer,” walking around with his trench coat, good-looking wife, lots of money, a flash. He’s a show-off.

He is the kind of guy, a sort of Sinatra of land development, where the average working guy, who doesn’t have much money, says this is how I’d behave if I were rich. I’d have big buildings named after me. I’d have a beautiful wife, I may have several wives. I would show off and talk about running for president even, I’d make fun of other people. I would be kind of a wise guy—a show-off. I can’t do better than that.

On Olympus, the gods roared with pleasure. To some extent, was Matthews describing himself?

Matthews has been a major “cable news” star since the mid-1990s. During that period, he has sometimes showcased his beautiful wife, “my queen Kathleen.”

A few years ago, he was showing off and talking about running for the Senate from Pennsylvania. Like a certain person we don’t plan to name, he opted out of the race.

Over the years, Matthews has routinely “made fun of people,” often in repugnant ways. Remember when he said that Al Gore “doesn’t look American, even?” We do! He was talking to his brilliant friend, Don Imus, at the time. But that was very typical stuff for Matthews during the years when he worked for conservative owner Jack Welch, the man who made him rich.

Here’s a second basic point about Matthews’ conversation with Maddow. In a rather familiar move, the cable stars almost seemed to blame the public for their own guild’s silly behavior toward Trump.

By last Tuesday night, Maddow seemed to have learned that Trump doesn’t have especially good polling numbers among Republican voters. Despite such problems, he has always gotten tons of attention from the national press when he starts claiming that he might run for the White House.

At one point on Monday night, Maddow acknowledged that basic fact. Before long, though, Matthews executed a standard conflation, without complaint from his hostess:

MADDOW: When he was making noise about running in 2012, I’m sure you remember this, we were all part of it to some degree or not, you know? But the tons and tons of attention, not just on cable but from all the networks and tons of print media attention, everybody was talking about the possibility of him running and the way he was attacking President Obama.

[...]

MATTHEWS: You seem dismayed by the man’s media power. He’s got it. People pay big money to live in one of his towers. They’re paved with gold.

You know, they’re—they’re confections, but people do go for it, as they went for Sinatra. Sinatra had talent. This guy is a particular kind of talent. It’s called PR. He knows how to build himself up and it`s all part of this comic book image that people are taken with.

They don’t hate Donald Trump. People don’t. They find him entertaining.

Maddow recalled the “tons of attention” Trump received from the press. By the time Matthews got through, he seamlessly seemed to be talking about the attitudes of the public.

This is a very standard conflation. The press corps routinely finds ways to blame the public for their own behavior.

Final point:

As of last week, Brian Williams has been reassigned by NBC News. Starting in mid-August, the handsome anchor will cover “breaking news” for MSNBC.

On yesterday’s Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter interviewed Dan Abrams about the new assignment.

Today, Abrams is chief legal correspondent for ABC News. But he was general manager of MSNBC from June 2006 through October 2007. He hosted a legal show on the channel through August 2008. In September 2008, the Maddow Show went on the air in that time slot.

Abrams was at MSNBC during many days of confusion. Today, the channel is trying to revamp its mission. In that context, we thought the highlighted comment was intriguing:

ABRAMS (6/21/15): You know, I think this is the way to reestablish Brian Williams’ credibility. And that’s why, by the way, I think that he’s probably very grateful, in the sense that they are allowing him to restore his reputation.

STELTER: Right. This is a big win for him.

ABRAMS: Huge win. They’re going to allow him to now get back into the news game, to be at the desk covering news, which he does really well. I mean, there are very few people who are as good as him in breaking news situations.

STELTER: That’s why I mentioned Charleston at the top. He could have been on MSNBC that night as all this information was spreading, helping people make sense of it.

ABRAMS: Yes. So I think it’s going to be a very—it will be a big win for MSNBC in that way.

Look, MSNBC is in the midst of a big transition. It has been “Lord of the Flies” over there for a number of years now, where the anchor with the best ratings basically runs the show. I think that Andy Lack is now moving in and saying, “OK, we’re going to start treating this like a news channel again.” And Brian Williams is the beginning of that.

Given his scrapes at MSNBC, Abrams may not be an impartial observer. But presumably, his “Lord of the Flies” comment was meant to describe MSNBC during both the Olbermann and the Maddow years.

In recent years, has the hapless liberal channel been letting Maddow “basically run the show”—basically do what she wants?

We have no idea! To our ear, there has always seemed to be a lack of journalistic supervision at the Maddow Show. To our eye, the situation has been getting worse of late—has been sliding out of control.

Maddow is good at selling herself. Even if Lord of the Flies breaks out, some liberals may not notice.

MISTAKENLY TAKEN FOR SMART: Rachel Maddow’s silence on Trump!

MONDAY, JUNE 22, 2015

Part 5—Clowning clown’s cowardly cowardice: Last Monday night, Rachel Maddow had to ask for help.

For weeks, she had been wasting her viewers’ time with endlessly inane attacks on obscure Republican “candidates.”

She couldn’t distinguish former governor Ehrlich (of Maryland) from former governor Gilmore (of Virginia)! She couldn’t recognize Pataki’s head shot! She pretended to snore every time she mentioned his (hugely irrelevant) name!

She offered inane, contradictory profiles of possible candidate Kasich. Night after night, she played her childish game of “poof” as she removed the names of three of her possible “candidates”—three people who were never going to be candidates in the first place.

In such ways, people like Maddow line their pockets and dumb liberal viewers down. But last Monday night, mysteriously, our Queen of Snark needed help in the case of Trump!

As we noted last Tuesday, Maddow began with a long, rambling discussion of her skills as a cable news star. With apologies, we’ll remind you of the endless things she said.

To us at home, what follows was supposed to be a marker of Maddow’s thoughtfulness and humility. In reality, this was her way of ducking Donald Trump:

MADDOW (6/15/15): Good evening, Chris. Thanks, my friend...And thanks for staying with us for the next hour.

Even for things that we are pretty good at, even for things that we are paid to do, all of us have our limits, right? Part of being an adult is recognizing the outer boundaries of what we are capable of as people.

So my job, for instance, is understanding and explaining the news. And in order to do that job, I do a lot of exposition in terms of just the raw, factual explanation of what’s going to in the world and in the news. I also do some analysis, a little analysis thrown in to explain about what’s important about going on in the news or at least what makes it interesting.

I don’t think I’m the best at my job. There are people in this building, for example, who are better than me at every aspect of my job.

I think I’m OK. Mostly, I’m really glad this is my job because I love doing it. I work hard to get better all the time.

But I have come to realize that there are limits. There are some things I can’t explain, or at least that I can’t analyze in any meaningful sense, because there is something that plainly is appealing about these things, or that seems important about these things, but I just can’t grasp it.

I know it means something to other people. I can see it in their faces. But I can’t get it. I can’t empathize.

And there aren’t a ton of these things, but there a few of them that come in a recurring way in politics, things that obviously really resonate with other people that honestly, I’ve figured out, I just don’t get.

At this point, Maddow listed three political stances she simply “doesn’t get.”

(Third example: She doesn’t get why presidents wear that special jacket when they’re on Air Force One. No, we aren’t making that up. This is Maddow’s way of saying she thinks your IQ is 60. It’s also a way to kill time.)

Eventually, Maddow reached her actual point. She doesn’t get the (alleged) appeal of apparent candidate Trump:

MADDOW: And here, we get to the limits of my abilities as a person who has a job like this, because it is not at all that I dislike Mr. Trump and, therefore, don’t see the appeal because I don’t share the affection for him that his supporters have. It’s nothing like that. It’s not qualitative at all.

I do not recognize—what’s going on here is that I don’t recognize, I cannot see that what he is doing is something that might conceivably to anyone have any political appeal.

[...]

I can’t see that kind of public persona, as being something that lays the foundation for a viable presidential run. But I also recognize that Mr. Trump does very well in the polling among Republican voters. There’s one new poll out today which he does lousy, comes in at 2 percent. But usually, and most of the national polls this year, he does pretty great.

In most of the national polls, Trump “does pretty great?” By the next night, Maddow would be telling her viewers that Trump actually has the highest disapproval ratings of any candidate for president in the past thirty-five years!

So it has gone as Maddow conducts her absurdly faux “campaign reporting.” By now, Maddow has been running a campaign gong-show for well over a month.

Especially given her previous clowning about a string of Republican candidates, Maddow’s agnosticism regarding Trump was especially striking. Suddenly, the snark was gone! In its place was sheer puzzlement, helped along by a remarkable statement:

“It is not at all that I dislike Mr. Trump,” the cable star said. “It’s nothing like that.” According to Maddow, her complaint or confusion concerning Trump is “not qualitative at all.”

What a remarkable statement! During the Obama years, Trump had been one of the most repellent voices on the entire American landscape. His birtherism has been unbelievably stupid—and depending on how you assess the motives for his ludicrous conduct, it has also been remarkably nasty.

As we’ll see, Maddow knew all about this. As we continue, we’ll explain why she played it dumb about Mr. Trump after weeks of mocking all other Republican hopefuls, often in remarkably low-IQ ways.

We’ll save that revelation for later. For now, Rachel Maddow needed help in analyzing Mr. Trump, who she doesn’t dislike at all! As she closed her opening segment, she offered her first tease for what was to come:

MADDOW: Frankly, I think he is going to run. I think he is also very easily going to make the debate cut, when a lot of serving Republican governors of major states are not going to make that cut.

But at a very base and a very present level, I just don’t understand this. I don’t know how this works politically. I don’t know how to analyze this phenomenon because part of me does not believe it is real.

It is real. Republican voters believe it is real, but I do not get it. I do not understand it. But joining us next is someone who tends to understand things when I do not.

Stay with us.

Maddow couldn’t figure it out—but someone was going to help her! After a commercial break, she teased the appearance again:

MADDOW: So Donald Trump is going to announce tomorrow that he is running for president of the United States.

And Jeb announced today, Jeb please don’t use his last name. And Hillary Clinton announced this weekend and started running these last few days not in the way that anybody expected her to.

We don’t have many days like this in politics. But we savor them when they happen. We have a special surprise guest coming up next here specifically for amazing political days like this. That’s next.

Stay with us.

Maddow was savoring this amazing day—and a special surprise guest was going to help her do it!

We recall thinking that her special guest must be Dan Rather—but no! When she returned, Maddow played tape of Obama mocking Trump in 2012 with the help of Jay Leno. After that, she introduced her friend, who tends to understand things when she does not.

She introduced Chris Matthews. In the process, made it clear that she understood Trump’s ugly history in the Obama years.

To watch this whole segment, click here:

MADDOW: President Obama, speaking in 2012, apparently never met real estate developer Donald Trump when Mr. Trump spent months railing at President Obama to release his rrrreal birth certificate.

But now, Mr. Trump is apparently launching a campaign to not just meet but to actually become president of the United States and Republican voters apparently don’t mind the idea too terribly much.

And I do not understand to think about that. I do not understand how to think about it. I do not understand what it means. I don’t even understand whether or not this is politics.

Joining us now is someone who I would like to help me, the host of Hardball, Chris Matthews. Chris, my friend, thank you so much for being here.

MATTHEWS: So I’m the grand vizier when it comes to explaining Trumpy.

MADDOW: I just feel like I don’t honestly know if this is just a celebrity/reality TV thing that I don’t get. Is this real politics? He kind of polls well.

Rachel rolled her r’s when she said the word “real,” the way she does when a minute has passed without any of her relentless clowning.

As she did, she made it clear that she knows what Trump has done in the past six years. But so what? Continuing to play it dumb, she introduced her friend, Chris Matthews, to help her puzzle out Mr. Trump’s large appeal.

Question: At this point, why would any progressive have no qualitative criticism of Trump at all? Of all people, why would Maddow, the queen of snark, adopt this agnostic posture?

One obvious answer would emerge as Matthews analyzed Trump. He started with this account of Trump’s alleged appeal, which actually seems to be rather low among Republican voters:

MATTHEWS (continuing directly): Well, he’s kind of a comic book figure. I mean, if you imagine in a Superman or better yet a Batman comic episode, he would be “Downtown Developer,” walking around with his trench coat, good-looking wife, lots of money, a flash. He’s a showoff.

He is the kind of guy, a sort of Sinatra of land development, where the average working guy who doesn’t have much money, says this is how I’d behave if I were rich. I’d have big buildings named after me. I’d have a beautiful wife, I may have several wives. I would show off and talk about running for president even, I’d make fun of other people. I would be kind of a wise guy—a showoff. I can’t do better than that.

And that is what he is. I think that is the appeal, just that.

To Matthews, Trump is a swaggering “show-off” from the world of comic books. The average guy sees Trump and thinks that he’d behave that same way if he could.

According to the national polls, not too many average guys think Trump should be president on this basis. Later, Matthews’ analysis became a good deal less benign:

MATTHEWS: On the issue of the birth certificate, I think that’s where the malice comes in. I think, as a business guy, he deals with a lot of land developers who are very right-wing, very hawkish, on the Middle East especially, very hawkish. And I bet every time he walks into a business meeting with one of those fellows they congratulate him for accusing Obama of being a foreigner, some sort of usurper, a Kenyan. Some absurd claim.

They seem to like it because it is malicious and it does play to racism. I’m not saying, you know, Donald Trump’s a racist. But he’s playing to the rabble out there that love the fact that some rich, successful guy underwrites their claim that Obama shouldn’t be president by some tribal illegitimacy. I think it’s all very business-like and malicious. I do think that.

We’re slow to drop R-bombs here. But plainly, Trump has been playing to some sort of “rabble,” offering the stupidest possible claims and insinuations about that fellow named Obama.

Why wasn’t Maddow able to say something like that herself? Why did she stage that long, inane rumination about her own limitations, then bring Matthews on the set to offer this analysis?

She had mocked everyone else for months! Why so polite about Mr. Trump, who she doesn’t dislike at all?

One possible answer is obvious. Matthews tracks it here:

MADDOW: If...he does actually both declare that he is running and go through the motions and make it into the debates, how does it affect the whole Republican field?

MATTHEWS: Well, it’s like an Agatha Christie play. It’s like Ten Little Indians. And I think if he gets in [the debates], he won’t just get in there and push out or crowd out someone.

He will be the show, because he will attack whoever the front-runner is. If it`s Walker—Scott Walker, he’ll knock his head off. He’ll do the same to Marco Rubio or even to Bush, if he makes a comeback.

His whole game the first night out, will be to knock out the front-runner and get in the lead. He won’t be in the jump. He will be the top of the story. And that will make the Republican Party look like a clown car because he’s in it. It’s going to happen.

It’s going to hurt the Republicans more than– You seem dismayed by the man’s media power. He’s got it. People pay big money to live in one of his towers. They’re paved with gold.

You know, they’re, they’re confections, but people do go for it, as they went for Sinatra. Sinatra had talent. This guy is a particular kind of talent. It’s called PR. He knows how to build himself up and it’s all part of this comic book image that people are taken with.

They don’t hate Donald Trump. People don’t. They find him entertaining.

According to Matthews, people find Trump entertaining. Also, Trump goes for the jugular with everything he’s got, including that “media power.”

Almost surely, this explains why Maddow has been happy to savage everyone else, but bowed and scraped in deference to Mr. Trump, who she doesn’t dislike at all, whose appeal she can’t understand. This is the way it works:

If you mock George Pataki, nothing happens. But if you mock or criticize Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump pushes back, often extremely hard.

We’ll guess that this simple fact explains the silence of Maddow—her refusal to criticize Trump all week, even after his ugly speech about all those Mexican rapists.

Concerning Maddow, let’s talk:

If you’re a liberal, Maddow votes the same way you do in presidential elections. In that sense, she’s “on your side.”

She also shares your stands on many issues. She supports abortion rights. She supports marriage equality. She is opposed to unnecessary restrictions on the right to vote.

In our view, she doesn’t seem to care very much about low-income kids or working-class people. But Maddow shares your position on the major social issues—and she’s endlessly willing to clown for you as she keeps imploring you to “stay with us” and “watch this space.”

Last week, she wasn’t willing to criticize the disgraceful Donald Trump. She did everything but scrub his back and comb his hair as she assured the world that she doesn’t dislike Mr. Trump at all—that it’s nothing qualitative!

What a truly horrible person this clowning clown has turned out to be! She continued to clown about Trump all week, even after the disgraceful speech he gave last Tuesday morning.

After Charleston happened, she took what she called “a point of personal privilege;” she spent an entire segment Thursday night kissing the ascot of Brian Williams. As mourning and analysis continued, she then took Friday night off.

It makes for a better news show.

Increasingly, we've come to see Maddow as an energetic con artist. Yes, she votes the same way you do. She shares your views on many issues.

But in our view, she relentlessly dumbs liberal viewers down and endlessly serves herself. Watch her (endless) segments about Mr. Trump last week. Tell us how we’re wrong.

Next: Two more quick points about Matthews’ critique. Plus, what Dan Abrams said.

Supplemental: Matthews tells Maddow about Donald Trump!

SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2015

But first, some peculiar news: On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump announced he was running for president. He made the kind of repellent speech he has been making for years.

On that evening’s Maddow show, Trump’s remarks were completely ignored. After clowning about Candidate Walker, Maddow clowned about Candidate Trump.

Alas! Maddow pretended that Candidate Trump had announced that he wants Oprah Winfrey as his running mate. She further said she’d be up all night hoping that Oprah could call her.

Maddow cavorted and played the fool Tuesday night—the approach she has taken to “campaign coverage” over at least the past month. At last, she seemed to do some reporting.

After noting that Neil Young doesn’t want the Trump campaign to play his songs at rallies, she offered some peculiar news about Trump’s polling numbers:

MADDOW (6/16/15): So endorsement for Bernie Sanders and “you can’t use my song.” That wasn’t great for Mr. Trump’s launch.

Also, the number crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com took a look at not just the current crop of people who are running for president in 2016. They actually looked at all major president candidates dating back to 1980. It turns out there are roughly 106 people who have run for president dating back to 1980, at least people who are major enough candidates that there`s publicly available data on their approval ratings and their disapproval ratings.

In that universe of data, out of all the more than 100 people who have run for president in this modern era, Donald Trump beats them all. Donald Trump has the highest disapproval rating of anybody on that list by quite some distance. And there have been some really unpopular people who have run for president.

I mean, no offense to my Uncle Pat, but Pat Buchanan was really unpopular when he ran in 2000. Forty-three percent of people had a negative view of Pat Buchanan when he ran for president in 2000 election. That was the worst ever. Donald Trump is worse than that by 14 points. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Donald Trump and he is running for the Republican nomination for president. So that’s a challenge.

According to Maddow, Trump has the highest disapproval rating of anyone who has run for president in the past thirty-five years!

In fact, she said he has the highest disapproval rating “by quite some distance.” At 57 percent, his unfavorable rating is higher than the nearest guy, her Uncle Pat, by a walloping fourteen points!

As you’ve noted, Maddow’s presentation wasn’t especially clear on this point. On the face of things, she seemed to be comparing Buchanan’s disapproval rating among all voters to Trump’s disapproval rating among Republican voters.

That suggests that Trump’s position in the GOP race is even worse than those raw numbers seem to suggest. But Maddow never clarified that basic statistical point. As usual, she was too busy hurrying off to the next showcase for her skills as a clown.

How unpopular is Candidate Trump? We can’t tell you that. If you want to examine the piece from which Maddow’s staff composed the text she read, you can just click here.

That said, we claimed that Maddow’s report included some “peculiar news” about those polling statistics. Here’s why we said that:

On Monday night—just one night before!—Maddow had wasted her viewers’ time with an utterly silly report about how well Trump was doing in the Republican polls.

In our own Tuesday report, we noted the absurdity of Maddow’s presentation. Here’s what she said on Monday night about the repellent candidate’s “pretty great” polling numbers:

MADDOW (6/15/15): I can’t see that kind of public persona, as being something that lays the foundation for a viable presidential run. But I also recognize that Mr. Trump does very well in the polling among Republican voters. There’s one new poll out today which he does lousy, comes in at 2 percent. But usually, in most of the national polls this year, he does pretty great. I mean, he is certainly on track to be included in the national debates, even as like the guy who came in second to Mitt Romney last time around and the governor of Ohio and the former governor of Texas, people who would seem to have a much more straightforward shot at the nomination, are coming in fairly consistently after him in the polling.

This is the way it goes on the floundering Maddow program:

On Monday night, we were told that Trump “does very well in the polling among Republican voters.” By Tuesday night, he was more unpopular, by a wide margin, than any other candidate in the past thirty-five years!

Maddow made no attempt to explain the apparent conflict between her reports. As she hurried off to the next showcase for her clowning, she seemed to assume that her viewers were too dumb or too tribal to notice.

To state the obvious, Maddow’s report on Monday night seemed to make little sense. As she described Trump’s “pretty great” numbers, results from three different polls appeared on the screen behind her.

In those polls, Trump had drawn support from 5 percent, 4 percent, and 3.6 percent of Republican voters. According to Maddow, therefore, support from two percent of Republican voters is “lousy.” By way of contrast, support from four percent of such voters is said to be “pretty great!”

Over the past month, this is the way it has gone on the Maddow show when its multimillionaire host isn’t overtly working from her seat in the cable news clown car. On Monday night, Candidate Trump was doing pretty great. By Tuesday night, he was the most unpopular candidate ever!

On Tuesday night, Maddow made no attempt to explain the apparent change in her analysis. Nor did she have a word to say about the repellent speech Trump had made that day.

By Wednesday night, Maddow finally offered a few remarks about Trump’s repellent speech. That said, she built the bulk of that night’s “campaign coverage” around another peculiar fact:

Trump had apparently paid an undetermined number of actors to come to his announcement speech and pose as Trump supporters!

So it went on the Maddow show as the nation headed toward the carnage in Charleston. On Monday night, Trump’s polling numbers were pretty great. By Wednesday night, he was reduced to paying actors to pretend to support him!

At no point did Maddow explain this puzzling change in the weather. But then, her “campaign coverage” has been an undisguised joke throughout at least the past month.

All week, we’ve tried to get back to the part of Maddow’s Monday night show where she asked for some analytical help concerning Candidate Trump. Because she doesn’t understand Trump’s appeal, which she said was “pretty great,” she called in “my friend, Chris Matthews” to help her puzzle it out.

Until events in Charleston hit, Maddow clowned about Trump all week. Despite all the ridiculous clowning, the most repugnant part of her performance was her abject refusal to tell the truth about who and what Donald Trump is.

Liberals are being badly served by this multimillionaire cable star’s defiantly faux “campaign coverage.” We can’t tell you why Maddow has been behaving this way. But at the start of next week, we’ll show you what Chris Matthews said about the noxious figure Our Own Rhodes Scholar “doesn’t dislike at all.”

Right from the start, Maddow was sold to the liberal world as being very smart. If we might borrow again from Bob Dylan:

But oh, what kind of “smart” is this, which goes from bad to worse?

MISTAKENLY TAKEN FOR SMART: Donald Trump channeled by Dylann Roof!

FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2015

Part 4—Maddow didn’t dislike him: With apologies, the lost, deranged soul known as Dylann Roof is said to have had a rationale for his recent conduct.

With apologies, three reporters explain his thinking in today’s New York Times. We offer this with apologies—apologies for the ugly derangement of this lost soul’s thoughts:

CORASANITI (6/19/15): Witnesses to the killings said the gunman asked for the pastor when he entered the church, and sat next to Mr. Pinckney during the Bible study.

They said that almost an hour after he arrived, the gunman suddenly stood and pulled a gun, and Ms. Washington's cousin Tywanza Sanders, 26, known as the peacemaker of the family, tried to calmly talk the man out of violence.

''You don't have to do this,'' he told the gunman, Ms. Washington recounted.

The gunman replied, ''Yes. You are raping our women and taking over the country.”

The gunman took aim at the oldest person present, Susie Jackson, 87, Mr. Sanders's aunt...

We’re always inclined to “pity the poor immigrant,” in the Bob Dylan sense of the term. Still, that reasoning defines what it is to be deranged, lost, no longer human.

That said, it isn’t like we hadn’t heard that song before. One day earlier, a deeply deranged, familiar figure had announced that he was running for president.

Blustering as he has done for years, he shared his ugly thoughts:

TRUMP (6/16/15): Our country is in serious trouble. We don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, China in a trade deal?

They kill us! I beat China all the time. All the time!

When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn't exist, folks. They beat us all the time.

When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically.

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you. It’s true, and these [gesturing at the crowd] are the best and the finest.

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

According to this disgraceful person, Mexico is “sending us” its rapists. They simply won’t send us their best.

That was an amazingly stupid and ugly presentation. In the most obvious sense, Donald Trump is Dylann Roof.

To state the obvious, Trump has been like this for years. During the Obama years, he stopped being a loud-mouth buffoon and became an ugly demagogue instead.

Back in 2011, we wrote a series of posts criticizing the editors of the New York Times for their failure to condemn the ugly things this ludicrous man kept saying right in their own city. Here’s an example of his brilliant ruminations on Fox:

HANNITY (4/15/11): He went to a Muslim school in Indonesia. He talks about studying the Koran. He talks about one of the most beautiful moments being, you know, prayer times at sunset.

TRUMP: Look, he was born Barry Soetero. Somewhere along the line, he changed his name.

I heard he had terrible marks and he ends up in Harvard. He wrote a book that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but the second book was written by an average person.

HANNITY: You suspect Bill Ayers [of writing the first book].

TRUMP: I said, Bill Ayers wrote the book.

HANNITY: Why do you think it's Bill Ayers?

TRUMP: Because everyone says he's a super-genius and he was a great writer.

[...]

Bill Ayers was a super-genius. And a lot of people have said he wrote the book.

“He was born Barry Soetero?” Trump is so dumb that he wasn’t even able to keep the basic conspiracy story-lines straight.

Meanwhile, Bill Ayers was a super-genius? Is Trump alive on this earth?

The man who made those remarks, and so many others, was deranged, disgraceful, sub-human. But right there in his own home city, the New York Times editorial board seemed reluctant to challenge the words of their powerful neighbor.

Eventually, they put two paragraphs of soft complaint at the end of this editorial. Four years later, the deeply ridiculous figure is back. This week, he shared his thoughts about rapists, as Roof would do the next day.

Someone else has had a hard time formulating her thoughts about the repugnant Trump. On Monday night—the night before he made his latest repellent remarks—Rachel Maddow offered her own ridiculous thoughts about this disgraceful man.

It was the latest installment in her bewildering, month-long imitation of “campaign coverage.” As always, her work this night was faux.

Donald Trump was going to announce that he was running for president! On Monday night, this led Maddow to offer a long, inane discussion about the things she just doesn’t get about American politics.

As it turned out, one such mystery was Trump’s political appeal. After reams of pointless, self-involved blather, Maddow weirdly said this:

MADDOW (6/15/15): In 2014, he said he was going to run for governor of New York. At the last minute, he decided he wouldn`t run for governor of New York after all.

Now, apparently, we are on the eve of him announcing whether or not he is going to run for president this time in 2016 as a Republican.

And here, we get to the limits of my abilities as a person who has a job like this. Because it is not at all that I dislike Mr. Trump and, therefore, don’t see the appeal because I don’t share the affection for him that his supporters have. It’s nothing like that. It’s not qualitative at all.

I do not recognize— What’s going on here is that I don’t recognize, I cannot see that what he is doing is something that might conceivably to anyone have any political appeal.

Say what? It is not at all that she dislikes Trump? It’s not qualitative at all?

Obviously, political analysis shouldn’t involve the question of “liking” a candidate. That said, it was astounding to see a figure like Maddow saying she had no “qualitative” problem with Trump “at all.”

Really? It’s not qualitative at all?

Trump has been a noxious figure for way too many years now. But Maddow went out of her way to stress the fact that she doesn’t “dislike” him at all!

She has no “qualitative” objections. She just can’t see the appeal! She had to call in “my friend,” Chris Matthews, to help her puzzle it out!

In a rational world, Maddow’s rambling discussion on Monday night made very little sense. Donald Trump is a deeply disgraced, repellent figure.

Maddow couldn’t begin to say that.

That said, we don’t live in a rational world—or at least, we haven’t been living in any such world as Maddow has conducted her “campaign coverage” over the past month. She has endlessly clowned and played the fool, focusing on abject trivia and endlessly talking about herself.

She’s very good at mocking people like Pataki, Kasich, Gilmore, Ehrlich and even Howard Dean. But when a figure like Trump comes along, she can’t bring herself to emit a single discouraging word.

Maddow’s ridiculous treatment of Trump continued on Tuesday night. That morning, Trump made the disgraceful comments we posted above. On Tuesday evening, Maddow completely ignored them.

Yesterday, we tried to give you a taste of the sheer inanity of Tuesday evening’s Maddow show. In her discussion of Trump, she focused on an invented claim—the claim that he had announced that he wants Oprah Winfrey as his running-mate!

This claim was false, but Maddow was clowning extremely hard that night. In the past month, she has done this night after night as she pretends to discuss the “campaign.”

Twelve minutes into Wednesday’s program, Maddow finally mentioned Trump’s comments about all the Mexican rapists. Her position? Candidate Bush should have challenged those remarks!

We had the exact same reaction! Except we thought that Broadcaster Maddow should have had something to say.

Can we talk? There’s no way to keep up with the sheer inanity of Maddow’s “campaign coverage.”

It may be some sort of ratings play demanded by the suits. It may be that Maddow has had some sort of intellectual meltdown.

Whatever explains it, Maddow is treating her viewers like fools as she conducts her “campaign coverage.” She’s clowning, faking, entertaining.

She has been conducting a scam. More politely, we’ll call it a gong-show.

For what it’s worth, Maddow is a major Manhattan figure. Sometimes, respect must be paid.

It isn’t just the magnificent Trump. Last night, she interrupted her coverage of the Charleston murders to spend an entire segment kissing the ascot of Brian Williams! Needless to say, she pretended she was being brave by engaging in such conduct.

Donald Trump has been a thoroughly degraded figure for way too many years. His public conduct has been an undisguised disgrace.

For whatever reason, people like Maddow doesn’t seem willing or able to say that. How hollow must a millionaire corporate progressive be to reach so sorry a state?

On Wednesday night, a young, deranged lost soul in Charleston acted on the same deranged venom Trump had spewed the day before. On Tuesday evening’s show, Rachel had simply ignored that venom.

Instead, she cavorted and clowned about Oprah Winfrey and just kept playing the fool. The night before, she went out of her way to tell the world that she doesn’t “dislike” Trump at all.

“It’s nothing qualitative at all?” After years of his ugly, disgraceful birtherism, why in the world is that?

This afternoon or tomorrow, we’ll show you what Matthews told Maddow about Donald Trump this past Monday night. Spoiler alert:

“Look who’s talking,” the analysts cried, as Matthews sketched his outline.

Supplemental: Perot siphons votes from the secret plan!

THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 2015

As Maddow recalls the Dean scream: Sometimes, we find ourselves asking a basic question. If it weren’t for bogus stories about our elections, would we have any stories at all?

Is any part of American life more driven by stories which someone dreamed up and everyone else quickly memorized? When it comes to our White House elections, it’s narrative all the way down!

This thought came to mind when we read Kathleen Parker’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post. We were struck by her love for the Bushes and her snark at the expense of the Clintons—and by a famous old tale:

PARKER (1/17/15): [M]y favorite [candidate in Campaign 1988] was George H.W. Bush, who was courtly, kind, handsome and, most important, treated me as if I were his equal. This was more than a paternal gesture; it spoke to his quality, character and class—the thread that runs through my more than 30 years’ exposure to and experience with the Bush family.

By the time the senior Bush was elected president in 1988, I was writing a different sort of column, more lifestyle than politics, and was busy with motherhood. But his defeat four years later by Bill Clinton, thanks largely to the chart-happy vote siphon Ross Perot, signaled a turning point in American culture and, therefore, in my column and my politics.

Lifestyle and politics suddenly collided.

After the national trauma of the Clinton years, during which mothers like me were forced to shield our children from the president’s deeds, it was a relief to see George W. and Laura Bush move into the White House. If nothing else was certain, at least no one would have to worry about blue dresses, knee pads and cigars.

I became familiar with these Bushes, as their years in office coincided with my own migration to Washington. I remember a comment George W. Bush made to me during a one-on-one, in-flight interview. He said the toughest moment of his life wasn’t what to do after 9/11 but seeing his father—“this fine, fine man”—defeated by Clinton. I thought for a moment he might cry, but of course he wouldn’t.

I also got to know Laura Bush when she invited Greta Van Susteren and me to travel with her to the Middle East to launch a breast cancer awareness program in four countries. People say you can learn about a person’s character by playing golf with them. The same is true about traveling together, especially under challenging conditions. It wasn’t like dodging bullets in Bosnia, mind you, but sharing close quarters with Secret Service snipers provides its own sort of bonding tension.

Parker is rarely poisonous. In our view, that basic fact makes this column especially striking.

Regarding the Clintons, she manages to get it all in, including “the blue dress” and “dodging bullets in Bosnia”—and, of course, the notion that President Clinton reached the White House “thanks largely to the vote siphon Ross Perot.”

In November 1992, the exit polls said that Perot took votes from Candidates Clinton and Bush in equal amounts. But for Bush adherents, this alternate story is more pleasing. It was quickly invented, and it has never died.

That’s how Bill Clinton reached the White House. How about Richard Nixon? Just this week, perhaps for the first time, we encountered the claim that Candidate Nixon never said he had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam.

Could that be an urban myth too? Based on a quick review, it seems that President Carter never said “malaise” and Candidate Nixon never said he had a “secret plan!” In September 2000, William Safire gave this account of the origins of the familiar story:

SAFIRE (5/21/00): In the 1968 primaries, candidate Richard Nixon was searching for a way to promise he would extricate the U.S. from its increasingly unpopular involvement in Vietnam. The key verb to be used was end, though it would be nice to get the verb win in some proximity to it.

One speechwriter came up with the formulation that "new leadership will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific." Nixon made it part of his stump speech, and the juxtaposition of end and win—though it did not claim to intend to win the war, but only the peace—drove his major opponent for the G.O.P. nomination, Gov. George Romney of Michigan, up the wall.

When a U.P.I. reporter pressed Nixon for specifics, the candidate demurred; the reporter wrote that it seemed Nixon was determined to keep his plan secret, though he did not quote Nixon as having said either secret or plan. But this gave Romney a chance to slam back at his opponent's promise. In what became the centerpiece of his stump speech in the snows of New Hampshire, Romney demanded to know, “Where is your secret plan?” That question skillfully presupposed an assertion of not just a general promise but also a detailed plan, and soon it became widely accepted that Nixon had said, "I have a secret plan to end the war.”

Years later, when a New York Times columnist attributed that direct quote to Nixon, a White House speechwriter challenged him to find the quote in anything taken down by pencil or recorder at the time. The pundit searched high and low and had to admit the supposed remark was unsourceable. (Look, the Nixon speechwriter was me and the columnist was my current colleague, Tony Lewis; I didn't have to research this.)

Sadly, it sounds all too possible.

Is there any story about our elections that someone didn’t invent, embellish, dream, massage or imagine? On Monday night, the analysts screamed in pain when they heard Our Own Rhodes Scholar recite the tired old tale from 2004 about stupid old Candidate Dean.

Needless to say, she was clowning about something Candidate Bush had said in his formal announcement speech that day. Still, she repeated the tired old tale about stupid old Candidate Dean and his ridiculous scream.

Warning! Clowning ahead!

MADDOW (6/15/15): There was this one moment today where [Bush] was a little owly.

Yes, “owl-ish,” I guess, is the way you say that. I didn’t expect the little owl noise. It was really great.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BUSH: So, here’s what it comes down to. Our country’s on a very bad course. And the question is, what are we going to do about it? The question for me—the question for me is, what am I going to do about it? And I’ve decided, I’m a candidate for president of the United States of America!
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

Woo!
(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: I did not see that coming. This is not an embarrassing thing that Jeb Bush did. This is not like Howard Dean with a scream in Iowa. This is not Jeb’s brother doing that “you’ve got to put food on your family” thing.

This is not bad. This is not something he has to live down. I don’t mean it that way. It was just unexpected. It was a very unexpected thing.

We made a little loop of it today. I’ve been watching it all day.

[Histrionically leans her head on her hand]

BUSH (videotape): Woo! Woo! Woo!

MADDOW: He’s got a little touch of the owl. Woo! And I say that as an owl fan. Woo!

As usual, Maddow was a) clowning extremely hard and b) talking about herself and her day. But she didn’t fail to ridicule Candidate Dean for the “embarrassing thing” he did when he “screamed” on the night of the Iowa caucuses.

(In the background, tape of Dean's famous “scream” appeared on the screen.)

She does this night after night after night. Can you possibly see why the analysts screamed Monday night?

MISTAKENLY TAKEN FOR SMART: Maddow goes manic!

THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 2015

Part 3—Fast-selling the news: On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump said he was running for president.

In his announcement speech, he made the types of noxious statements which have become his ugly trademark in the Obama years. By Tuesday night, he was being savaged on Hardball—and by George Will and Charles Krauthammer, on the Fox News Channel.

Trump is one of the dumbest, most noxious figures in modern American discourse. Everybody seems to know that—except Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow.

Sure enough! As Maddow began her program Tuesday night, she was discussing her favorite subject. As usual, the clownish cable news star was talking about herself—about herself and her staff.

She was also aggressively selling a product—a product she calls “the news:”

MADDOW (6/16/15): Good evening, Chris. Thank you very, very, very much. And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.

So today was amazing in the news. In just the news about politics today, we changed the stories that we were going to cover, and the order of everything? We changed the show like 300 times today, because new things kept happening all afternoon and into the evening, each of which was more amazing than the things that had come before on this amazing news day.

Up to and including Jeb Bush slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show tonight, which has just happened. We actually just got the tape of it.

We will have that for you in just a moment. It’s mind-bending.

As any sane person could see, the tape of Bush slow-jamming the news actually wasn’t mind-bending. But in these opening comments, you can see several aspects of Maddow’s performance art which are eating her program alive.

On the one hand, Maddow loves to let us know what she and her staff have been doing.

We’ll offer a guess as to the reason for this approach. Aside from Maddow’s apparent self-absorption, this is likely a marketing play—an effort to make us feel that we’re just “part of the gang” when we watch this increasingly ludicrous show.

Maddow and her staff are our bestest TV friends! A few minutes later this evening, Maddow would crack herself up with a somewhat tasteless, somewhat puzzling joke about Candidate Walker. As she did, she would issue a shout-out to a staff member who had also lost her composure in the face of the TV star’s astonishing wit:

MADDOW: [Walker] had his wedding on the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. He had his life-changing, career-defining gubernatorial recall election on the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s death. And we now know, at least according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that Scott Walker will formally announce that he is running for president on July 13th, which will be the 30th anniversary of the exact day that Ronald Reagan had a benign noncancerous polyp removed from his large intestine.

I know, right? I know. Wow. [Attempting to control her laughter]

So in terms of who else is going to get in, we still don’t have a date—

I’m sorry, Jackie. I think I hurt Jackie.

Apparently, “Jackie” was the staffer we could hear laughing at Maddow’s incredible wit. In this way, staff member Jackie earned an on-air shout-out.

As with the nightly naming of the Mousketeers on the old Mickey Mouse Club program, Maddow seems to want us to think that we know her staff members and that they’re lots of fun. But then, it doesn’t end with the staff on this self-referential program.

A bit later on Tuesday night’s show, we were also treated to this:

MADDOW: Programming note. It’s about the show and also not about the show.

First of all, the not-about-the-show part. Very important is that it’s my mother’s birthday today.

Hi, Mom. Happy birthday!

[Childishly waves to Mom]

And here is the about-the-show part. Mom, tomorrow, on the occasion of your birthday, I have planned for you tomorrow a really excellent story for about the Pope because I know you love the Pope. And I know in most families that would be a really weird birthday present to give your mom, but not in mine.

In my family, that’s perfectly normal, isn’t it? I think it is.

Happy birthday, Mom. I love you. Pope tomorrow.

Even the part that’s “about-the-show” started with a statement to Mom! But then, as Maddow shared in late January, “I’ve mentioned a few times on the show before that I come from a family that is rich in nuns.”

In theory, a person could do a smart news program while constantly talking about herself, while making staff members a part of the show and cracking up at her own jokes to the point where she has to issue shout-outs to similarly-afflicted staff.

In our view, Maddow isn’t achieving that end at the present time. Her “campaign coverage” has been astoundingly dumb in the past month or so. Her coverage has been massively dumb, even by the miserable standards of American “cable news” programs.

What makes the coverage so dumb? It’s isn’t simply the self-absorption, which seemed to be on display once again as Maddow discussed the way she and her staff had changed her program “like 300 times today...on this amazing news day.”

It isn’t just the self-absorption which drags this program down. It’s also Maddow’s constantly peddling of “the news” as an “exciting,” “dramatic” and “fun” TV product—her constant attempt to convince us, the low-IQ liberal rubes, that it will be exciting and fun if we watch her increasingly ludicrous, low-IQ “news” program.

In her current manifestation, Maddow is constantly selling “the news” as a product—and she was selling very hard this night. In just her first 128 words, she told us, three separate times, that “the news” had been “amazing” that day, with one event reaching “mind-bending” status.

In fact, “the news” hadn’t been amazing this day. Beyond that, the slow-jamming by Candidate Bush wasn’t “mind-bending” at all.

But even as she keeps citing our friends the Maddowsketeers, Maddow is constantly selling this product—and increasingly, the product she’s selling is amazingly dumb, especially her endless and blatantly faux “campaign coverage.”

How “amazing” were the events of this day? As Maddow continued her opening monologue, she offered her first example.

Uh-oh! To make the event seems more “amazing,” she misinformed us for a while. We’re sorry, but what she’s saying here simply isn’t accurate:

MADDOW (continuing from top post above): We will have that for you in just a moment. It’s mind-bending.

In addition to that, we’ve got Donald Trump announcing that he is running for the Republican nomination for the president of the United States today.

You obviously heard about that, it got lots of press today. But did you also hear that Donald Trump, since he announced that he’s running for president this morning, he has since then announced who he wants his running mate to be?

It’s the first day he is running for the nomination for president, but he’s already announced his running mate, who he’s running with. And he says he and this running mate, unbeatable combination, they will definitely win.

Now, since he made that announcement today, we have been trying all afternoon and all evening to reach that person, to reach Donald Trump’s would-be running mate to find out if she’s into the idea. Yes, she! We will have that for you in just a moment.

Today is just nuts. Today is one of those days that is just nuts. Too much stuff is going on, and it is all interesting.

Maddow is constantly telling her viewers that what they’re hearing is “interesting.” In this case, she invented a phony embellished claim to help us see that the news was so “interesting” this day that it was really “just nuts.”

Readers, ask yourselves a question. Have you heard that Donald Trump has announced who he wants his running mate to be?

Almost surely, you haven’t heard that said, because Trump has made no such “announcement.” Maddow was referring to something Trump said that day in response to a question from George Stephanopoulos—a question about something Trump had said, apparently as a joke, back in 1999.

Whatever! Goosing “the news” as she constantly does to make it seem “amazing,” Maddow told her liberal viewers that Trump had “announced” that he wants Oprah Winfrey to be his running mate!

After inventing this embellishment, Maddow did what comes naturally. She turned it into an exciting story about herself:

MADDOW: So we have put in a call to Oprah Winfrey’s enormous company today to see if they would give us a statement to find out if, over the course of these past 16 years that he’s been floating the idea, whether or not she has warmed to the idea of being Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate. Whether she would like to be vice president to Donald Trump.

So far, we have not heard back from Ms. Winfrey. I’ll let you know. I’m going to be sitting by the phones all night in the hopes that she might call.

Obviously, she’s probably not going to call. I would guess, if she does call, that she’s going to say no.

But what if she did call and she said yes? What if I was the first person she said yes to about that?

I will be up all night. I will have the ringer on. Oprah Winfrey, please call! That was awesome. Today has been an amazing day in the news.

Oprah! Over here! Oh please, please, please pick me!

Obviously, Maddow wasn’t up all night with her ringer on. Meanwhile, no one else is discussing this vice presidential “announcement” because it didn’t occur. That said, the chance to sit up all night, waiting and hoping for Oprah’s call, was just another element in the awesome news day Maddow was actively selling.

Last night, Maddow closed her show in a way which was even stranger. She said today’s news would be so awesome that none of us should go to bed.

This is the way she started:

MADDOW (6/17/15): Tomorrow’s going to be nuts, because all in one day tomorrow—first of all, we`re going to have Supreme Court rulings. We don’t know which ones yet, but at 10 a.m., we’re going to find out. The fate of lethal injection, the fate of Obamacare, the fate of same-sex marriage nationwide.

We’re still waiting on rulings on all of those and a whole bunch of other cases. And it’s possible the Court will put off the big ones until even later and tomorrow won’t be any of the big cases but it is already June 17th. It’s getting kind of ridiculous.

As she continued, Maddow mentioned the possibility of congressional action today on “the big trade bill”—the big trade bill she never discusses or explains, thanks to all the time she wastes examining the head shots of George Pataki. She also mentioned the pending release of the Pope’s encyclical on climate change.

Hi, Mom!

According to Maddow, Thursday (today) will be nuts! On that basis, she made this peculiar suggestion as she ended last night’s show:

MADDOW (continuing directly): Honestly, tomorrow is going be too much. My recommendation, in terms of dealing with tomorrow, is that you should not even go to bed tonight. You just stay up and wait for tomorrow’s glorious dawn of news to shine on your face because you think this news week has been nuts, tomorrow’s [pause] done.

That does it for us tonight. We’ll see you again tomorrow.

“Because tomorrow’s done?” We agree—that didn’t make sense.

Is something “wrong” with Maddow? If so, that’s a bad thing, of course. But it’s hard to watch her devolving show without wondering about that question.

Her manic delivery; her constant selling; her absurd imitation of “campaign coverage”—her devolving performance has achieved a degree of inanity where such questions should arise.

That said, we’ve shown you little of what she has said about Donald Trump’s performance this week. Tomorrow, we’ll return to Monday night’s program, when she asked for analytical help from her friend, Chris Matthews.

Maddow has clowned about Trump all week. For today, we’ll only tell you this:

If you don’t like her account of Trump, you should simply wait awhile. Each night this week, the basic story has changed.

Something seems to be badly wrong with Rachel Maddow’s “news program.” But as has been the case for decades, the liberal world seems unable to recognize the most obvious manifestations of any state of affairs.

That’s the way we got President Bush. Are we hoping for President Walker?

Tomorrow: Matthews on Trump. Readers, look who’s talking!

Supplemental: Barbaro transforms himself at the Times!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 2015

Seems to be identifying as the younger Frank Bruni: Everyone is asking the question! Can Rachel Dolezal transform herself from “white” to “black?”

In our view, the answer is no, unless she wants everyone to think she’s constantly lying. That said, a seamless bit of transjournalism seems to be taking place at the New York Times.

Michael Barbaro seems to have started identifying as the younger Frank Bruni! Today, Barbaro’s fawning profile of Candidate Bush seems to come straight from the work of Bruni in 1999 and 2000, when he was raving about that era’s glorious Candidate Bush.

In today’s profile, Barbaro stresses Candidate Bush’s wonderful sense of “ease” on the trail. Where have we seen this before, we flawlessly asked.

Hard-copy headline included. A definite blast from the past:

BARBARO (6/17/15): Now Official, Bush at Ease on Trail in New Hampshire

On his first day as a full-fledged, no-longer-just-thinking-about-it candidate for president, Jeb Bush called his adopted hometown Miami “a crazy, wacky place.” He spoke of the trauma of discovering that a hacker had published personal emails he had written about the health of his father. He gave a long, emotional hug to a woman who told of her decades-long struggle with mental disabilities.

And he confessed to a rookie error.

Grabbing back the microphone after wrapping up an event here, Mr. Bush, a former Florida governor—who has not held public office in eight years—asked for a do-over. “I blew it,” he said, before revealing his mistake: He had somehow forgotten to ask his audience to vote for him.

Unencumbered by the artifice and awkwardness entailed in not quite campaigning for the last six months, Mr. Bush on Tuesday seemed a different kind of presidential candidate: disarmingly playful and noticeably relaxed, quick to joke and eager to connect.

Where had we seen that before, we flawlessly asked. And then, of course! We had it at last! Bruni wrote the same profile of the previous Candidate Bush in November 1999. In fact, he wrote it several times!

No, really! Let’s compare combs! Hard-copy headline included:

BRUNI (11/27/99): Levity Is at the Soul of Bush, the Puck In the Political Pack

As George W. Bush loped through the headquarters of the Timberland Company here, he might have been any candidate in the hunt for votes, any pol on the path toward the presidency. He tirelessly shook hands, dutifully took questions and let a multitude of promises bloom.

But there was something different about Governor Bush's approach, something jazzier and jauntier. It came out in the way he praised a 20-year-old man for his "articulate" remarks, then appended the high-minded compliment with a surprising term of endearment.

"Dude," Mr. Bush called his new acquaintance.

In each case, the Times reporter was blown away by the natural air of his era’s Candidate Bush. As Barbaro continued his profile this morning, he let us see how skillfully the current Candidate Bush is able to joke around with the folks:

BARBARO (continuing directly from above): As he spoke at a town hall-style meeting here, he noticed that a young woman he had met earlier in the day—who had complained about her crippling student-loan debt and ill-advised psychology major in college—was sneaking out of the room.

As she neared the door, Mr. Bush mischievously singled her out. “You’ve left!” he said.

“Sorry,” she replied, “got to work.”

Mr. Bush’s wry response: “Well, I’m glad you got a job.”

The audience erupted into laughter and applause.

Sixteen years earlier, Bruni captured the same playful spirit. Candidate Bush is mischievous now. He was vaguely naughty back then!

BRUNI (continuing directly from above): It emerged again when Mr. Bush crossed paths with an elderly employee, and she told him that he had her support.

"I'll seal it with a kiss!" Mr. Bush proposed and, wearing a vaguely naughty expression, swooped down on the captive seamstress.

Mr. Bush's arm curled tight around the shoulders of other voters; he arched his eyebrows and threw coquettish grins and conspiratorial glances their way. It was campaigning as facial calisthenics, and Mr. Bush was its Jack LaLanne.

Back then, Bruni captured Candidate Bush’s kisses and hugs. This morning, Barbaro does the same:

BARBARO (continuing directly from above): One of those who queried Mr. Bush was a woman with developmental disabilities who told Mr. Bush that “doctors told my mother to put me away.” Instead, she said, her mother refused, and the woman now holds down a job helping children like her.

Before she had even asked her question, Mr. Bush walked over and gave her a firm hug.

“The limits people may have,” he told her, “pale by comparison to the joy they can bring.”

We’re sorry, but those are the same freaking profiles! Rachel Dolezal thinks she’s black. Barbaro thinks he’s Frank Bruni!

This isn’t Barbaro’s first fawning profile of the new Candidate Bush. On Saturday, he did everything but shine the candidate’s shoes on his brilliant trip to a dazzled Europe.

In this case, the fawning involved the repeated claim that Jeb is better than the previous Candidate Bush. People, whatever it takes! Scripted headline included:

BARBARO (6/13/15): In Europe, Leaders Take Note: Jeb Bush Isn’t His Brother

After emerging from a 45-minute meeting here with Jeb Bush, the foreign minister of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told colleagues that what struck him most about the American was not the strength of his opinions but something simpler: the depth of his curiosity.

Mr. Bush, who will declare his candidacy for president on Monday in Florida, had impressed Mr. Steinmeier, a veteran of European policy and diplomacy, with a wide range of pointed questions about the Middle East, Ukraine and Greece. It was, declared a German official involved, “a broad tour d’horizon.”

When Mr. Bush’s brother George first ran for president, he erroneously referred to Greeks as “Grecians,” flubbed the name of India’s leader and confused Slovenia with Slovakia, offering the world an unabashed portrait of provinciality.

But across Europe this week, Jeb Bush revealed himself to be a very different kind of Bush: well traveled, almost encyclopedically knowledgeable about foreign countries, and possessing the genuine inquisitiveness that his brother had so notably lacked.

The Candidates Bush have changed on the fly. At the Times, the fawning continues.

During Campaign 2000, Bruni endlessly fawned to Candidate Bush. Does Barbaro plan to follow suit?

We don’t know how to answer that. But these two profiles by Barbaro are straight outta the younger Frank Bruni.

Bush is so relaxed, so sharp! Where have we heard that before?

How Candidate Goofus was profiled: Is Barbaro planning to fawn about the new Candidate Bush for seventeen months?

We can’t answer that question. “Panchito” fawned so much during Campaign 2000 that a few people actually noticed!

Meanwhile, Candidate Gore was being profiled in an equal but opposite manner. Where Bruni was stressing how natural his candidate seemed, Katharine Seelye kept helping us see that Candidate Gore was a fake and a phony.

This profile from late October 1999 is a good example. Seelye constantly notes the artifice involved in Gore’s every move.

As always, a baby (almost) cries when the hopeful draws near!

SEELYE (10/27/99): Mr. Gore has not only revamped his campaign—rejiggering his staff and moving his headquarters to Nashville—but he is trying to overhaul himself as well. With Mr. Bradley projecting the persona of an independent nonpolitician, Mr. Gore is trying to make himself appear more casual and less scripted.

This calls for serious attention to detail: not only khakis and cowboy boots and a PalmPilot clipped to his belt, but changes in body language and careful word choice. Instead of letting his arms hang limply at his sides, Mr. Gore gestures. Instead of telling people he went to Vietnam, he makes a point of saying he "enlisted," a word that strategists say strikes a chord with listeners.

Instead of just cooing at babies, he now picks them up. This did not amuse one little girl here who looked at him with some alarm. "I'm not too scary!" the Vice President tried to reassure her. "I'm not too scary!"

Perhaps the biggest change is in his campaign appearances. He is making fewer speeches on podiums to vast audiences, instead making himself available to small groups of voters to press his case one on one. He is even campaigning door to door. Last night he ducked into a few houses here, spending several minutes with surprised families. ("The house is a mess," grumbled Tom Mulligan, who said the visit was "totally unexpected.")

Candidate Gore was reinventing himself! He was no longer letting his arms hang limply at his sides!

And not only that! When he tried to pick up a baby, the baby looked at him “with some alarm.” Needless to say, Tom Mulligan “grumbled” about that unexpected visit from the annoying Gore.

Without explicitly saying so, Seelye made it sound like Mulligan was pissed. It was strange to see the way a different reporter described that same visit, using explicit language.

The reporter was Timothy Connolly of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. In this passage, he speaks with Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe:

CONNOLLY (10/27/99): Vice President Albert A. Gore, who has slipped below Bradley in the polls, is trying to revive his campaign with retail politics—he is canvassing neighborhoods and talking to people in their living rooms.

"After one stop, this guy named Mulligan said he was impressed with Gore," Oliphant said. "When I asked why, Mulligan said, "He's the first presidential candidate to knock on my door.' "

Only in New Hampshire.

For the record, Candidate Gore ended up winning the state over Candidate Bradley.

The Los Angeles Times also described the Mulligan visit as a successful interaction. But so what? At the New York Times, Seelye spent two years putting a negative spin on every move Gore made.

In Seelye’s world, the babies never stopped crying when Candidate Gore drew near! Incredibly, this was the closing passage of Seelye’s final campaign report:

SEELYE (11/4/00): Despite the nerve-racking closeness of the election, Mr. Gore showed uncharacteristic spontaneity with the crowd of thousands huddled in a sports stadium. The vice president focused suddenly on one baby, bundled up in a pink snowsuit and held aloft by a man. "Hold your baby up one more time," Mr. Gore yelled out. "What is your baby's name?" he asked.

The answer drifted back across the crowd, "Christina."

"Let me tell you," Mr. Gore shouted. "This entire election is about Christina's future. Will we have the best schools? Will she have opportunity in her life?"

Christina started to bawl.

"Will she stop crying?" the vice president called out affectionately. "Yes, she will," he said. "Hi Christina," he said, giving her a small wave.

Incredibly, that was the end of Seelye’s last campaign report.

Seelye and Bruni never quit during that long, disastrous campaign. Barbaro is out on the trail as we speak with a new Candidate Bush.

Does he plan to pander to this Candidate Bush all through this campaign? We’re only asking because that’s what happened the last time this show came to town.

(We can’t find links to the last two reports. We’re using the Nexis archive.)

MISTAKENLY TAKEN FOR SMART: Rachel Maddow’s Two Faces of Kasich!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 2015

Part 2—Our own absurd dumpster fire: How dumb can it get when cable news star Rachel Maddow presents her “campaign coverage?”

Consider her recent, puzzling presentation about the two faces of Kasich.

John Kasich is in his second term as governor of Ohio. As Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports in today’s New York Times, it seems increasingly likely that he will enter the Republican White House race.

Kasich is 63. Because he entered the House at age 31, he’s been around a long time.

Kasich was chairman of the House Budget Committee during the Gingrich revolution of the mid-1990s. During that tumultuous era, he was often portrayed as the highest-ranking House Republican who wasn’t visibly crazy.

(For a memorable anecdote from Al Franken’s book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, you can just click here, then scroll down.)

Whatever! Three weeks ago, Maddow was killing time on her time-wasting show with one of her nightly imitations of “campaign coverage.”

As usual, Maddow was wasting time this night commenting on the long list of possible candidates for the GOP nomination. As usual, she was pleasuring liberal viewers with long, snark-ridden ruminations about the inanity of these possible candidates.

This evening, it was Kasich’s turn. In an amazingly dumb presentation, Maddow actually said what is shown below.

As she started a deeply inane presentation, Maddow marveled at the fact that no one could pick “this guy” out of a lineup. What would make a guy like this think he should run for the White House?

MADDOW (5/27/15): One after the other, they keep either announcing that they`re in or signaling that they`re going to be in. Like, for example, this guy.

Do you recognize this man? Could you pick this man out of a lineup? Could you pick him out of this specific lineup?

I mean no offense by that. I just mean to say, by virtue of his deep national obscurity, and honestly, his lack of any distinguishing political characteristics in this field, this guy was one of my personal top contenders for a guy who would take a look around and decide not to actually run.

But alas and behold, the Washington Post reports today that he, Ohio Governor John Kasich, is in.

Today, his long-time friends and strategists close to him told the Washington Post that John Kasich will formally join the race for the Republican nomination for president sometime after June 30th. And it turns out John Kasich might be kind of a fun addition to the race. The last time he ran for president was the year 2000, when George W. Bush chased John Kasich and everybody else out of the Republican field by just blowing everybody away in terms of early fundraising and early endorsements.

John Kasich talking to the Washington Post about the fact that he’s going to—he’s going to run this year again. He was asked about that experience in 2000, and he told the Post, quote, "I didn’t get scared out in 2000, I got destroyed out. I had no money and no oxygen." That’s what happened to him in 2000 when he ran against George W. Bush.

The Post then asked him about the prospect of doing it again, the prospect of running against another front running Bush brother who’s trying to push everybody out of the race with early, show-offy fund-raising and all the rest. But check out what John Kasich had to say about running against Jeb Bush this year.

This is from today’s article, Dan Balz and Robert Costa in the Washington Post. Look!

Asked in this recent interview whether his message would be similar to Jeb Bush’s message, John Kasich said, ‘I don’t know anything about Bush’s theme. I really don’t. I’ve never listened to him. What’s Right to Rise? Getting up in the morning?’”

Right to Rise is the name of Jeb Bush’s super PAC.

So Ohio Governor John Kasich. I mean (a), even though he’s the governor of Ohio, sadly at least for now, he’s totally unrecognizable and indistinguishable from all of the other candidates in the field. At least he will be to most Americans looking at him in the midst of this giant field of contenders, (a).

But (b), he’s apparently going to run anyway. And (c), if his initial quotes about running are anything to go by, let alone his well-known tendency toward emotional outbursts in Ohio politics, John Kasich might end up being fun to watch, if we can just remember which one he is when it comes to putting a camera on a guy who we think is John Kasich. Is that him?

She “meant no offense by that!” That said, a quick bit of background:

Over the past month, Maddow has alternated between two types of time-wasting during her “campaign coverage.”

On the one hand, she offers snarky putdowns of this type, in which she mocks the alleged lack of a national profile for a potential candidate like Kasich.

On alternate nights, she wastes enormous amounts of time attacking Fox News for its plan to limit the first GOP debate to just ten debaters. This will mean that people like Kasich won’t get to participate, she laments, at enormous time-wasting length.

Her portrait of Kasich was openly mocking on May 27—and it was rather dimwitted.

We wouldn’t vote for Kasich ourselves; we vote for the Democratic candidate. But is it true that a Candidate Kasich would arrive in the race with a “lack of any distinguishing political characteristics in this [Republican] field?”

Obviously, that isn’t the case, if you know anything about Kasich’s record—in which, for example, he accepted Medicaid expansion in Ohio under the ACA.

At any rate, Maddow mocked the pathetic Kasich this night. From there, she wasted time mocking George Pataki, displaying his head shot and leading us in a guessing game as to who this goober could possibly be.

Discussing Pataki at this point was an act of journalistic malpractice. It did allow Maddow to pleasure viewers by mocking every Republican she could find.

That said, Maddow underwent a quick conversion concerning the laughable Kasich. Eight nights later, without explanation, she flipped about his manifest greatness.

On this occasion, Maddow had started by mocking Candidate Christie for looking too fat in his softball suit. Now, she turned to the new-and-improved Candidate Kasich:

MADDOW (6/4/15): Also, today was probably not a great day for John Kasich, who is one of those guys on paper who ought to be a high-flying, top tier potential candidate. He’s a former very high-profile, very conservative member of Congress. After he got out of Congress, they gave him his own show on the Fox News Channel. They thought over at Fox that he was such a good politician and so conservative and so charismatic and so telegenic that he ought to be a TV anchor.

John Kasich is really well connected in the party, not only in his home state of Ohio, but across the country. He is now the governor, the sitting governor of the great swing state of Ohio, the current governor of that state.

But today was a bad day for Governor John Kasich because of this.

These were the results of the new Fox News national poll of the presidential candidates that came out today. And yes, at this point in the race in any reasonable year, under any reasonable strategy, nobody should care about national polling—except for the fact that this year we have to. And the candidates really have to, because of the debates, because Fox News is organizing the first Republican primary debate and the way they’re deciding who is going to make it into that debate, who`s actually going to be allowed into the stage, is that they’re only taking people who crack the top ten in the otherwise meaningless and totally non-predictive national polls. That’s what they decided to count on.

Well, in the new Fox News national poll out today, John Kasich, governor of Ohio, former Fox News host, doesn’t crack the top ten. And so he’s therefore on track to not be included in the first Republican presidential primary debate, even though that debate is going to be on Fox News, his former employer, and even though that debate is going to take place in his home state of Ohio where he’s currently the governor.

But at this rate, he is not going to be invited to participate in that debate. He’ll be watching from home, which awkwardly is the governor’s mansion. This is very sad, right?

What a difference a week can make! On Wednesday, May 27, Kasich was ridiculed for “his deep national obscurity, and honestly, his lack of any distinguishing political characteristics in this field.”

On Thursday, June 4, a whole new Kasich appeared. Suddenly, he was “one of those guys on paper who ought to be a high-flying, top tier potential candidate.” After all, he’s “really well connected in the party, not only in his home state of Ohio, but across the country.”

In truth, Kasich really wasn’t a “very conservative member of Congress” back in the day, certainly not by the standards of his party. If he enters the race for the nomination, he will have to answer for several of the ideological heresies which make Candidate Bush seem suspect to the “very conservative” voters who dominate Republican primaries.

That said, Maddow had discovered a second Candidate Kasich in the week which passed. But then, ridiculous nonsense of the type has dominated her embarrassing “campaign coverage.”

There’s an old saying in New Hampshire: “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a while!”

The same principle seems to obtain with Maddow’s “campaign coverage.” Over the course of just eight days, she seemed to discover The Two Faces of Candidate Kasich.

In the process, though, she seemed to reveal a second puzzle. She seemed to reveal the deeply puzzling Two Faces of Maddow herself.

Is something “wrong” with Maddow? Over the course of the past month, her imitation of campaign coverage has been an embarrassing, insulting mess.

Originally, Maddow was sold to us as someone who’s very smart. Even today, her work is often mistakenly taken for smart.

But as the weeks continue to pass, the “journalist” sold as Our Own Rhodes Scholar is being described in less flattering ways. More and more often, Maddow is being mocked as Our Own Absurd Dumpster Fire. And let’s face it:

If liberals are willing to tolerate this type of work, the problem with American politics rather plainly is us.

Last night, the clowning continued apace. As a group, are we really this easy to play? Why do we tolerate this?

Tomorrow: Gilmore and Pataki and Christie oh my! After that, back to Monday’s pitiful discussion of Candidate Trump

Ways to pleasure the base: On June 4, Maddow unveiled the all-new-and-improved Candidate Kasich.

Suddenly, Kasich was “one of those guys on paper who ought to be a high-flying, top tier potential candidate.” After all, he’s “really well connected in the party, not only in his home state of Ohio, but across the country!”

Maddow worried about the potential exclusion of this great man from that first GOP debate. Quickly, though, she returned to a basic project—the maintenance of liberal viewers:

MADDOW (continuing from above): I mean, John Kasich hasn’t technically declared today. Heading into today, there were nine officially declared Republican Party candidates. The next candidates who have set a date for their announcement and earn themselves dotted lines on our chart, they are, in order in terms of when they’re going to announce, next Donald Trump on June 16th. Bobby Jindal, after him, on June 24th.

Sometime after Bobby Jindal, we are expected to hear from Congressman Peter King and from Governor Kasich, then your sister-in-law getting in, then the three guys who drive trash trucks, then a Cheney or two, and a whole football team, then my mom and Mr. T., then that Muppet, Janice, the one with the nice eye shadow.

Come on! Eventually we’ll be reporting on who’s not running.

Maddow returned to the ridicule with which she pleasures liberal viewers. Just that quickly, the glorious Kasich was linked to Mr. T, your sister-in-law and “three guys who drive trash trucks.”

(Maddow has little interest in, or respect for, people who work for a living. She cares about issues which affect the upper end.)

“Eventually, we’ll be reporting on who’s not running?” Maddow has already done a lot of that over the past clowning month!