September 25

KING KONG HOUSE PARTY AND NERFS ON MEET THE FRASS

Charles P. Pierce, in Esquire magazine, asks of Kevin McCarthy: “Was it worth it, Kevin? The Speakership of the House of Representatives, I mean. The long, excruciating session of the House back in January? Fifteen long, excruciating ballots, between which, you had to negotiate with people who have pinwheels in their eyes? All of it on television, as the Democrats sat back and blithely watched the auto da fé like rubberneckers at a train wreck? All of that pain and embarrassment so you could call yourself the Speaker of the House even though everybody and his Uncle Fud knew you couldn’t actually be Speaker? Is it all worth it now, when there are too many chickens and not enough roosts?” So, here we stand…Kev has to be in his position to insure that the government is funded for the next year, but nobody is lifting a hand to help. Pierce says, “The Democrats are sitting over in the corner, making more popcorn. To the members of his own narrow majority, McCarthy is now poison among the extremists for going back on the deals he made to become Speaker, and among the more marginally sane, he is now poison for having made those deals in the first place. And Representative Lauren Boebert seems to be the only one capable of reaching across the aisle.” Snort, snort…good one!

Pierce believes our radical conservatives owe their current power to Newt Gingrich from his two years of radicalism in harassing the Clintons. “The logical end of being fed red meat constantly is cannibalism. And that’s the evolutionary stage of American conservatism at which McCarthy, that sap, finds himself now,” adds Pierce. He goes on to say that McCarthy’s fall parallels that of Gingrich after the GOP saw their House majority narrowed, particularly after Newt spent so much time on the Lewinsky scandal. He does credit him as being the architect of the first GOP House majority since 1954, giving him a couple of years of power and street cred…something Kevin lacks, and will never have.

Michelle Cottle of The New York Times contends that Mac has had it with the bullying of the zealot horde he has encouraged, but Gaetz and Greene are probably correct in that the Speaker is not following their rules, made in the smoke-filled rooms back in January, a problem with deals hatched in secrecy. Cottle says if the rabble-rousers wish to be taken seriously, they need to stop the King Kong act and at least file their threatened motion to dump McCarthy. She says, “The extremists are easy to denounce, especially with their tendency to act out like unruly teens – or Lauren Boebert at ‘Beetlejuice, but they are not to blame for the chaos consuming the House. It is Mr. McCarthy who led them to believe he would champion their policies and priorities. And it is Mr. McCarthy who elevated their influence in the conference, empowering them to wreak even greater havoc. Of course, they are going to make more and more outrageous demands. That’s what they do.”

Politico’s site reports the more than dozen Republicans, mostly Representative Byron Donalds‘ colleagues in the conservative Freedom Caucus, who are publicly torching the spending plan he brokered. With just a four-seat majority, Speaker Kevin McCarthy can only afford to lose a handful of them given that he can’t count on Democratic votes, leaving the GOP bill effectively D.O.A. The failure of the two negotiators he had empowered has brought on a full-House-party rebellion. Going beyond a simple centrist vs. right-wing clash, the Freedom Caucus itself is divided, with members backhanding the plan presented by their own leaders, along with the rising hue and cry to oust McCarthy should he rely on the Democrats to avoid a shutdown. Indiana’s Republican Representative Victoria Spartz vented, “The Republican House is failing the American people again and pursuing a path of gamesmanship and circus. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have the backbone to challenge the corrupt swamp that is bankrupting our children and grandchildren. It is a shame that our weak speaker cannot even commit to having a commission to discuss our looming fiscal catastrophe.” Charles Pierce describes Spartz as “one of the few truly eccentrics left in the Republican caucus in what passes for the GOP middle these days.”

Andy Borowitz in his The Borowitz Report in The New Yorker writes.“Calling a conflict raging in the U.S. Capitol “a clear and present danger to the world,” Volodymyr Zelensky offered to broker a peace deal between Representative Kevin McCarthy and his fellow House Republicans. The Ukrainian President warned that, if the fighting in Washington continued to escalate, it could spread to neighboring regions such as Maryland and Virginia. ‘My message to the warring parties is simple: it is time to stop the madness,’ he said. He said that he hoped to arrange a sit-down between McCarthy and House Freedom Caucus members such as Representative Lauren Boebert, ‘perhaps over a vape pipe.’ Though hopeful for a breakthrough, Zelensky acknowledged that negotiating with McCarthy and his Republican foes will be a challenge because ‘English does not appear to be their first language, either.'”

In the week following Kristen Welker’s first broadcast on Meet the Press, taking over after Chuck Todd’s retirement from the Sunday news show, she and NBC have endured a barrage of criticism for providing yet another venue for Trump to spout his drivel…with little pushback from Welker. Shades of Chuck Todd! Couldn’t we expect to be rid of this timidity in a new start which we’ve needed since losing Tim Russert? Jamess on Daily Kos says they have lost him as a viewer if NBC is simply going to act as a doormat for Donald Trump’s lies, feeling that he is not alone in that regard along with others who are grounded in reality. Kristen permitted Trump to blather on with statements untethered to reality on many critical issues without any forceful, dogged or worthwhile response. Trumpy the Clown did his usual shtick with his machine gun tongue…a stolen election, the J6 insurrection…anything that Welker brought up to have a decent exchange was dismissed. She was not prepared, and is not endowed, with the necessary intensity to take on Trump’s bombast, and is perhaps even unable to seize upon the issues of importance. Trump smelled fear and he went to work, with his torrent of outrageousness. One TV executive said, “It was a crazy way to set the tone of what Meet the Press will be under Kristen Welker.”

CNN’s senior media reporter, Oliver Darcy, makes the observation that newsrooms currently are treading into the unknown with the problem of “covering Trump.” This isn’t 1990, when decorum and honest debate, based on underlying policies were the rhetorical standard…the party of insurrection has a new leader, a new standard with bullying and shoveling the b.s. Darcy says, “When interviewing Trump, the goal cannot be to make ‘news’ like one might attempt with a typical politician. The purpose of the interview must be to hold power to account. It must be about asserting the facts in a meaningful way and forcing Trump to confront them. He will still, of course, lie – but at least the audience might be able to see through the showmanship if the interviewer displays a firm grip on the subject matter and exerts command. Unfortunately, few in the press who have taken on the assignment have proven capable of executing the difficult task in a compelling way. That doesn’t bode well for the news industry or, more importantly, democracy at large.”

So, wherein lies the need to interview Mr. Trump at all? What is there to gain since he lies like the rest of us breathe? Why go to the trouble, being unprepared to challenge the onslaught of lies in real time? He doesn’t need a national media platform if he refuses to play by the rules that are set down. Lending a modicum of respectability and credibility to the most ruinous and dishonest politician/showman/conman/grifter to further trash the goals and values of a once fact-based society is beyond comprehension. Definition of Meet the Press now making the rounds: the new home of Trump-speak – an ongoing train-wreck of compliance and deference to the perpetual Bully. Since everyone in the country is running for the US Presidency, primarily to keep themselves out of jail, they’re only here to help. The Constitutional mission of a newsroom, a free press, should be a dedication to holding government to account…not the greatest show on Earth, just the facts, Ma’am! Yeah, that’s the ticket, just the NEWS…assuming that skill-set is still an option in corporate news media.

Keith Olbermann in his Countdown podcast says he believes NBC News has launched internal investigations into Meet the Press staffers, including Kristen Welker and the executive producer, David Gelles, regarding violations of existing guidelines by airing the Trump/Welker ‘interview‘ without adequate fact-checking or warnings. The pre-taped program seems to fly in the face of “The NBC News Employee Handbook” which prohibits presenting provable falsehoods, which gave them three days between taping and broadcasting to edit any b.s. A second issue may be that a fact-check was not done in a simple dereliction of duty, but a pre-arranged agreement to convince Trump to submit to the presentation after his four-year snub of NBC. Olbermann has no proof of any of this and is on the trail. He speaks from his own experience with NBC, as he received a suspension without pay several years ago when he tangled with the network over involvement with campaigns of Raul Grijalva and Gabby Giffords. He was demoted from staff to a non-contract employee without benefits, after which he sued NBC for breach of contract, which garnered him $18M in damages. He thinks heads may roll, a la the Chris Licht/CNN dumpster fire when Kaitlan Collins had a similar ‘interview‘ with Trump on that network’s Town Hall, and that Meet the Press itself has a questionable viability. “They wouldn’t run this tripe on Dateline!” barks Olbermann.

Olbermann seems to know for certain that NBC veterans are calling for investigations based on the fact Welker and NBC News reporter, Dash Burns, wined and dined with Washington insiders including Jason Miller, Steven Cheung, and Chris LaCivita, Trump thugs all, in Milwaukee the night preceding the first GOP presidential debate. This would not necessarily be considered a breach of the NBC code, but the handbook would probably discourage such a meet-up; and, as Politico reports, the news employees paid their own expenses and not be guilty of accepting meals, gifts or other items of value from a political contact. At 10:00 am Eastern time, NBC website posted a fact check of the Welker fiasco. At 10:13 am its Meet the Press account tweeted: ‘Former President Trump made a spate of false and misleading comments about immigration, foreign policy, abortion, and more in a wide-ranging interview with Meet the Press moderator, Kristen Welker.’ So, why this post? The interview was in the can for three days before the broadcast…the content was well-known, so they knowingly aired lies, false or misleading commentary sans disclaimers or caveats. In violation of their own policy – an extinction-level event! With follow-up clips sent out on MSNBC, CNBC and NBC-owned affiliates! Then they had the nerve to interview Peter Baker of The New York Times who rationalized why the network wasn’t committing journalistic suicide by platforming a skilled, practiced, professional, psychotic liar. Insert a Shrug Emoji dressed in a suit, says Olbermann.

Summing it up, Olbermann believes NBC News, Meet the Press and Kristen Welker will never live down their premeditated decision to forfeit 75 years of journalistic credibility built up by their predecessors, and the best Welker can hope for is to be viewed as damaged goods, or a punchline, as is Kaitlan Collins after the CNN Town Hall snafu. The MAGA-Fascist lunatic right see NBC and CNN as the worst news entities, yet both organizations have engaged their networks in shocking and disgraceful episodes by prostituting their platforms to give Trump unfettered access to poison the viewing public with his lies and vows of political revenge, and the promised destruction our democratic institutions, while seeking to pardon his band of convicted insurrectionists. It seems that both networks are positioning themselves to survive in a world taken over by Trumpists in the future, or they are too greedy, blinded to the fact that they have been manipulated into pimping for the evil in our body politic. So, is it complicity or stupidity? Have they seen the actions of a Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News as successful? Olbermann casts a sidelong glance at the likes of Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Lester Holt, and Savannah Guthrie, and even Rachel Maddow, wondering if they are completely adhering to their principles or merely standing up for the high dollars of their salaries. Will the dominoes start to fall, or will the softballs complacency turn into mere Nerf balls?

During a dull White House dinner several years ago, Melania Trump leaned over to chat with Secretary of State Tillerson.

“I bought Donald a parrot for his birthday. That bird is so smart, Donald has already taught him to say over two hundred words!”

“Very impressive,” said Tillerson, “but, you do realize he just speaks the words. He doesn’t really understand what they all mean”

“Oh, I know”, replied Melania, “but neither does the parrot.”