THE REFUSAL TO FIGHT: Our most pitiful child!

MONDAY, MAY 20, 2013

Part 1— Rachel does it again: Last Wednesday night, at 8 PM Eastern, Rachel did it again.

The darling child was starting her eponymous TV program. As she did, she shared the latest good news with a declining array of liberal viewers:
MADDOW (5/15/13): Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.

So today happened! Today, the president of the United States fired the head of the IRS, or announced that his resignation had been accepted.

Also, the whole Benghazi scandal, the months-long scandal, kind of went away today.
Interesting! The Benghazi scandal had kind of gone away! A few minutes later, Rachel repeated the gist of this claim as she clowned in an assortment of ways, helping us learn to love her more completely and fully:
MADDOW: And in the midst of all this going on, did I mention that the president released his own financial disclosure forms today? His personal ones? Sure, why not? What the heck, nothing else is going on!

In the midst of the supposed scandal on Benghazi falling apart—we will still get to that—and the firing of the head of the IRS and, oh hey, here comes the prime minister of Turkey and all of these other things going on, there’s also the ongoing actual big controversy that is not about the IRS and is not about Benghazi and this one is actually harder to call a scandal because the White House is not embarrassed about it, and is not apologizing for it, and is not denying it, which is what you expect when you call something a scandal.
The Benghazi scandal had fallen apart! Also, the AP thing wasn’t a scandal because the White House wasn’t denying it!

Did the Benghazi pseudo-scandal fall apart or go away last Wednesday? Actually no, it did not. But two nights later, on Friday’s show, Rachel repeated her claim.

As she did, she made a second ridiculous claim about the history of this gong-show. But then, Rachel seems to lack the first clue about the living of life on this planet:
MADDOW (5/17/13): Don’t worry. In case you missed today’s hearing on the IRS scandal, there will be many more. There will be endless hearings on this. At least it seems.

The next ones are already scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. This is the new story that the Republicans, and even the Democrats this time, are going to make their obsessive, 24-hour a day investigative reason for living from here on out. And they have time to do that in part because the other scandal that the Republicans have been obsessing on and trying to wring for all its worth, for months now, has kind of fallen apart in the last few days.

More specifically, it’s actually just taken a really hard turn in the past few days. It was this time last week when the Benghazi scandal finally crossed over into a mainstream concern, right? Instead of just fuelling all-caps exclamation point misspelled fundraising chain mail letters on the right.
According to Rachel, Benghazi hadn’t become “a mainstream concern” until the previous week! Up until then, it had just been “fuelling all-caps exclamation point misspelled fundraising chain mail letters on the right.”

You know? Among those people?

In those presentations, you see how deeply, profoundly clueless Maddow is able to be. Beyond that, you see the latest iteration of an epic twenty-year fail—the refusal of the career liberal world to fight when gong-show attacks are launched against liberals and Democrats from the mainstream and from the right.

All week long, we’ll consider Maddow’s recent work, along with that of her cowering colleagues, as they’ve extended this twenty-year pattern. For today, let’s consider how inane her two basic claims were last week.

Did the Benghazi pseudo-scandal fall apart last week? If so, no one remembered to tell the Washington Post! Five days after Maddow’s announcement, yesterday morning’s Sunday Post was thumping on doorsteps around DC—and the paper was crammed with scathing indictments of the administration’s perfidy concerning Benghazi.

On the op-ed page, David Ignatius devoted an entire illogical column to the administration’s grotesque bad faith. For our critique of this ludicrous column, just click here.

On that same op-ed page, George Will’s column bore this headline: “Obama’s tapped-out trust.” Benghazi didn’t seem to have fallen apart for George Will or his readers:
WILL (5/19/13): Now, regarding Obama's second-term agenda. His reelection theme—reelect me because I am not Mitt Romney—yielded a meager mandate, and he used tactics that are now draining the legitimacy that an election is supposed to confer.

One tactic was to misrepresent the Benghazi attack, lest it undermine his narrative about taming terrorism. Does anyone think the administration's purpose in manufacturing 12 iterations of the talking points was to make them more accurate?
Plainly, Benghazi hadn’t gone away from the Post’s op-ed page. But then, Benghazi was also front and center for the paper’s official fact-checker.

On page A5, Glenn Kessler’s weekly Fact-Checker piece was devoted to Obama’s perfidy concerning Benghazi. The piece was bannered across the top of the page. Obama was given four Pinocchios—the most Pinocchios possible!—for a recent comment he made concerning Benghazi. In the hard-copy paper, the headline said this:

“Obama takes revisionist history too far in parsing Benghazi”

Benghazi hadn’t fallen apart for the Washington Post’s fact-checker. And in the Sunday Outlook section, Benghazi was the central concern for the paper’s “Five Myths” feature.

Below, you see Michael Hirsh’s headline and synopsis. Does it sound like Benghazi has fallen apart in the Outlook section?
HIRSH (5/19/13): Five Myths About Benghazi

The events surrounding the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, look dramatically different depending on your politics. Republicans tend to see a cover-up and a scandal. Democrats see an attempt to damage President Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton. A Pew poll suggests that the public is divided as well, with 40 percent saying the administration has been dishonest, 37 percent saying it has told the truth, and 23 percent saying they're not sure. Let's assess what we do and don't know.
“Benghazi is a pseudo-scandal manufactured by the GOP,” Hirsh wrote at one point. But uh-oh! That statement was one of the myths he said he was rejecting!

Earth to Maddow: Benghazi was everywhere you looked in yesterday’s Washington Post. But then, Benghazi was also widely discussed on yesterday’s Sunday talk shows. Whatever you may think of this topic, Benghazi hasn’t fallen apart or gone away—unless you’re getting your news from one of the most clueless corporate TV performers on the national scene.

How about Maddow’s second claim—the claim that “the Benghazi scandal finally crossed over into a mainstream concern” on Friday, May 9? Good God! Benghazi crossed over into the mainstream many long months before that, although we can give you no definitive date.

When did Benghazi go mainstream? Here’s one possible date: Tuesday morning, October 16, 2012, when the Washington Post published a front-page hit piece, “U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice at center of storm over comments on attack in Benghazi.”

Here on our sprawling campus, we began pushing back on this bullshit in response to that crossover piece, which appeared midway through last October. But we think you know the rest of the story:

At MSNBC, all the children kept quiet last fall, except the one excitable child who totally purchased the con. For two solid months, Rice's name wasn’t so much as mentioned on the network’s prime-time shows as she was thrown down the stairs.

Why did the children keep quiet? Finally, we get a possible explanation: Rachel didn’t see this topic going mainstream until the second Friday in May 2013! The overpaid children didn’t speak up because they were thoroughly clueless!

Is that why the children didn’t speak? We have no idea. But here’s the question we ask you today: Is it possible to be more clueless than Rachel Maddow is?

We follow with a second question: is it possible that Maddow isn’t quite as clueless as he seems? Is it possible that she and her colleagues simply don’t want to fight when people like Rice get thrown down the stairs on the basis of gong-show charges?

At some point, the explanation from ignorance does start to seem unconvincing. For twenty years, this disgraceful pattern has obtained all across the career liberal world. Multimillionaire stars like Maddow have always refused to fight back against such attacks. They have come up with endless excuses explaining why they won’t fight.

All week long, we’ll explore Maddow’s recent nonsense as a window into this history. Why has the career liberal world refused to fight for the past twenty years? Why do people like Maddow run when big mainstream media goes after major Democrats? Why do they offer ridiculous claims like the two Maddow authored last week?

The analysts screamed and ran for the door when they saw Maddow clowning last week. Isn’t it time the liberal world threw this darling child down the stairs?

Tomorrow: Not the first time!

3 comments:

  1. Bob,
    You really seem to have an ax to grind with Rachel Maddow. Did she turn you down for a date once? Or is it just total jealousy because she's on TV and you're not?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Maybe it's because she sucks at her high paid job.

      Delete
    2. "Maybe it's because she sucks at her high paid job."

      No, no, there are no flaws worth mentioning in Maddow's exemplary work.

      The only reasons to critique Maddow are one's own sexual and career frustrations.

      Delete