Tag Archives: MSNBC

Political Rants

Ten in Georgia.

It would be hard to overstate the sheer joy being felt by our corporate media over the last couple of weeks. It reminds me of those times when there’s three major stories and a hurricane. They are never so happy as when the news machine is firing on all cylinders, and that is certainly what’s happening now – impeachment hearings, international upheaval, Democratic debates. Lots and lots of content, and very little effort needed to push it out.

So here I am, sitting in front of the television on debate night, watching the long wind-up led by erstwhile nightly news anchor Brian Williams, basking in the lights, moderating a conversation between failed Senate re-elect candidate Claire McCaskill, former Howard Schultz vendor Steve Schmidt, perennial talk show host Joy Ann Reid, and Chris Hayes, smartest man on TV.

The ten candidates include a billionaire who basically bought his way onto this stage. Cautionary comments from Schmidt and McCaskill counseling centrism. Hoo boy.

First question from Rachel Maddow to Warren, about impeachment. She gives a strong, sharp answer. Klobuchar nervously harkens back to Walter Mondale. Bernie starts with focus on poor and working people – thank you, senator. Birthday Joe stumbles into his first response … hoo boy.

Still too big by half.

Cory Booker’s criticism of Warren’s wealth tax is as vacuous as Buttigieg’s criticism of Medicare for All. Biden thinks 160 million people are happy with their health insurance.  I suspect he’s including me in that count, and if so, he fucking bonkers.

Gabbard vs. Harris is, frankly, irritating. They are both deeply problematic people.

The billionaire speaks! He’s pushing power down to the American people. The other rich guy compliments him. Tom Steyer wants to build millions of new housing units. Sounds good, but … how? Amy Klobuchar, who happily votes for $750B military budgets, thinks we can’t afford more than 3 months of paid parental leave. Priorities, right?

Climate change question! But it’s put to Tulsi. Let’s start that one with someone who, I don’t know, might be president. Tom Steyer gets the second whack at it. Really? Pissing match between him and fellow white guy Biden. Bernie leaps in, like Lester (ask your jazz fan mother).

Harris defends confrontation with North Korea. Joe doubles down on that, and gets the stand off between Russia and NATO backwards. I’m no fan of Putin, but NATO expansion is a legitimate concern for any Russian government, given their history of being invaded from the west.

Kudos to Booker for raising the war in Yemen. Double kudos to Bernie for his comments on Israel-Palestine and Saudi. He’s way out ahead on that. Commercials. Someone has to pay for that expensive stage set, including, apparently, a California based anti-immigration group.

Joe responds to a question about #metoo and resorts to an unfortunate metaphor for his fight against partner violence. “Keep punching at it” is a poor choice of words.

Finally an immigration question! That’s what happens when Castro and Beto aren’t invited.

Halfway decent (and congenial) conversation on abortion rights, though I wish to hell they would raise the judiciary in this context.

That’s about it. Cue commercial.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Say what?

The more I watch TV talk shows, the more I realize that they live and die by a simple maxim: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That’s the principle that puts John Brennan, Norman Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and others of their ilk on centrist-liberal shows on MSNBC. I suppose it’s not all that surprising that the election of Donald Trump would result in the rise of a lowest common denominator resistance, such that open-throated advocates of the Iraq War and other disasters have spent the last three years nursing their reputations back to health, hour by hour, on Morning Joe and other platforms. I’m not the first, certainly, to point out that the left suffers under reactionary presidents as the broad opposition tends to focus all their energy on defense of existing policies under attack, at the expense of breaking new ground. That’s understandable … but do we really have to make common cause with Bill Kristol? Really?

This is the hashtag resistance on MSNBC.

Well, it’s worse than that. Because the corollary of this guiding principle is the notion that the friend of my enemy is also my enemy, and so, too, is the friend of that friend. We’re seeing that play out on the foreign policy front. This week, Rachel Maddow and others on MSNBC, in their desire to paint Vladimir Putin as this master manipulator, appear to have swallowed whole the ridiculous claim made by John Bolton and Mike Pompeo that Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro was set to flee his country, his plane idling on the runway, when Vladimir Putin told him to stay put. Maddow was chiding Trump for allowing himself to be duped by Putin; she almost sounded sympathetic to Bolton’s plight as yet another Trump administration principal who has been outflanked by his boss in public. I realize the whole bit is half played for laughs, but I fear irony is lost on today’s viewing public.

The same dynamic is playing out over North Korea. Bolton and Pompeo are obviously throwing a monkey wrench into the Korean peace process, while simultaneously trying to gin up conflicts and regime change in Iran, Venezuela, and ultimately Nicaragua and Cuba. Everyone on MSNBC, from commentators like Maddow down to newsreaders, are playing up claims that Kim Jong Un appears to be stepping away from any informal agreements regarding arms testing, suggesting that he’s taking Trump for a ride. So, in essence, they are advocating for returning to something like the confrontation of 2017, when we came within a whisker of war. That is insanity. Regardless of your opinion of Trump, we need to encourage a peaceful end to that confrontation and follow the lead of the South Korean president.

One can only hope that we can unseat Trump next year. If we fail, at the current rate, the hashtag opposition will likely go full-on neocon before 2022.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Old number 41.

I don’t take joy in anyone’s passing, great or small. We’re all living beings with a limited time in this timeless universe, and there’s nothing to celebrate when death takes its toll, even when the departed is someone you are not at all fond of. I would have to count George H. W. Bush as someone who fits that description. Despite all of the glowing tributes from members of our political elite and millionaire media personalities, he was an awful president in a lot of ways – one that left a toxic legacy we’re still grappling with. The invasion of Panama alone was enough to wipe away any pretense of a “kind and gentle” leader, but the administration of Bush 41 went far beyond that atrocity.

Bush nice? Ask a Haitian. Ask an Iraqi.In listening to the hagiographic coverage put out by NPR, NBC and MSNBC, it’s clear that H. W, Bush’s conservative politics is a kind of “sweet spot” for our mainstream press – the ideal foil to the uncouth hair-hatted fiend who currently occupies the White House.  Like the McCain funeral, this is an opportunity to demonstrate their middle-of-the-road reactionary bona fides. It’s as if there’s Trump and then everyone else, and they take the side of the latter. The stupidity of the rhetoric is kind of sobering, though. On Morning Joe, Willie Geist was talking about how Bush 41 chose to join the Navy as an aviator, as if that was a singularly selfless act. The guy is so distant from the notion of conscription that he barely knows what he’s talking about. Note to Willie: Practically everybody ended up in uniform and shipped overseas in those days. Aside from a draft, there was enormous societal pressure to join up and do your part. Every military age male in my extended family at that time was sent to fight in World War II (one didn’t return, another committed suicide afterwards).  No shade on Bush 41 – he sacrificed during the war, but his experience was very, very common.

I won’t tick through George H. W. Bush’s record on Panama, on Haiti (supported the 1991 coup), on Iraq, on Central America (consummated the criminal terror war against Nicaragua), on the war on drugs, on AIDS policy (hands off), on Clarence Thomas, and so on. It’s been treated elsewhere in much greater detail by better writers than me. All I can say is that, while I’m sorry he’s dead, he was not a “kind and gentle” leader by any stretch of the imagination, and he played a central roll in getting us to the awful place we find our selves in now. While I was never a fan of Clinton, I was glad to see Bush go in 1993, and I’m still glad he never had that second term.

No secret why I wasn’t invited to the funeral. Again.

luv u,

jp