Even the liberal MSNBC network:
Peggy Noonan, a conservative columnist at the Wall Street Journal, has joined NBC News and MSNBC as a contributor, the cable channel announced Sunday.
Right now, MSBNC is beating CNN and Fox in terms of ratings. But Andy Lack (who’s rocking the Steve Bannon look in his Wiki picture) is determined to change all of that.
I hate most of the people on MSNBC except Rachel Maddow. I don’t object to having conservative guests. But if I wanted to listen to washed-up vodka drinkers defend Trump, I’d turn on RT.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Nooners will appeal to that highly valuable 70+ demographic.
Cermet
Of all the lying cowards in all the fly filled filthy bars in the world, she ends up at that network – great; another reason to laugh at MSNBC
Don Roszel
I agree with you about Rachel. Her opening segments are some of the best investigative reporting on TV for my money. Thing is? All any of the major cable networks talk about these days is Trump. There is other stuff going on in the world. So, I listen to BBC World news in the car
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
The more I think about it, the madder I get – why not avoid a highly paid pundit and hire three actual investigative reporters and production assistants?
Wjs
Someone actually said “we need Peggy’s insight on our network” and that person still has a job?
FlipYrWhig
Is it humanly possible to hate Joy Reid? Hopefully she’s an exception at least.
I’ve even warmed to Lawrence O’Donnell over the years, whose show used to be utterly painful to watch.
Hal
I don’t get the logic Andy Lack is channeling. Hayes, Maddow and O’Donnell are all surging in ratings because of their coverage of Trump, and his massive unpopularity with everyone but the Fox News cultists. There is an audience for people like Joy Reid and others. Lacks response is to add conservatives who are not all that appealing to that growing audience? And Noonan especially. In the very least, aren’t there a few less noxious conservative commentators to add variety, if that’s what you’re looking for?
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/22/17
Trump risks obstruction charge pressuring McConnell on Russia…
Barbara McQuade, former U.S. attorney, talks with Rachel Maddow about whether Donald Trump’s reported pressuring of Mitch McConnell on the Trump Russia investigation constitutes an obstruction of justice.
rikyrah
@Hal:
I think he’s mad that Hayes, Maddow and O’Donnell are so successful.
Quinerly
I guess going for the older crowd and name recognition. In the snippets I have caught of her, she has been quite critical of Trump. Not as critical as Jen Rubin (she has called Trump pathetic 3 times…basically everytime I have glimpsed her this week, she is saying “pathetic.”) Can’t stand PN, but in what I have seen she seemed pretty sober? and very critical. Her skin looks pretty good. Think she’s had some work to prepare for HDTV.??
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/22/17
Trump special adviser Carl Icahn mired in self-dealing scandal
Rachel Maddow explains how Donald Trump’s Special Adviser on Regulator Reform oversaw a part of the market that ultimately benefited him to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
CapnMubbers
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Nice to know my demographic is highly valuable, but Nooners? NO, a thousand times NO.
Nicole
Oh, my fucking God. That idiot?
I look forward to Maddow giving her a tongue bath just the way she did Greta Van Sustern.
Who’s next, Tucker Carlson?
(I do like Joy Reid, but fortunately, she tweets a lot so I don’t have to turn on MSNBC for my fix)
rikyrah
uh huh
uh huh
The Secret Service has agreed to stop erasing White House visitor log data while a lawsuit goes forward. https://t.co/MnooUT965p
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 23, 2017
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
I know I was shocked by CNN, while showing the protests, had a chyron that said, “Protests in streets after Trump’s angry, divisive speech”. And Don Lemon’s denunciation of Trump as unhinged.
Where were these people last year?
swiftfox
As I rowed in the gym I wondered who that was. When she was ID’d, I never looked again. MSNBC has supplanted CNN as the cable news channel of choice for the gym.
rikyrah
JUST IN: Trump attacks Flake for being “weak on crime and border” one day after rally in Arizona https://t.co/9JzAGCufUL pic.twitter.com/cfDqg12G3A
— The Hill (@thehill) August 23, 2017
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Cermet:
I used to tend bar at a genuine shithole in a crappy neighborhood for grocery money my first couple of years of practice. There was a hateful old bat about 80 years old who lived up the street. She was the widow of a police officer, and generally got takeout food from the bar, drinking alone at home during the week. On Saturday night, she’d dress up and put on broad hats and come to our shithole to drink.
It was the same routine every time – she’d order a VO and ginger, and promptly tip me $2 (which was always the last tip I’d see from her). She then would then proceed to knock back at least 5 more (beyond that, I would cut back on the pour), while getting belligerent with the all patrons around her AND me. I actually had to bar her for two weeks on one of the earlier occasions when she fell off her barstool while telling an underemployed construction laborer to fuck off.
Anyway, that’s the sort of drunk I suspect Nooners is.
Major Major Major Major
@Don Roszel: for instance, the strange tale of the Danish homemade submarine and the murdered journalist.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Doing free live coverage of his campaign speeches from empty podium to triumphant exit.
Tuna
Saw Peggy on Nicolle Wallace’s show yesterday. She seemed ill at ease having others on panel challenge her opinions.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@rikyrah:
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Major Major Major Major:
I assumed that the murdered journalist was either Scooby Doo sleuthing alone, in an unsafe place under the complete control of the killer OR doing a story on him and accidentally discovered a treasure box of human parts while wandering about in the submarine.
This is unlikely to be his only kill.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: Chris Hayes’ eternal grad student persona can be wearying, and he gets stepped on by guests I suspect Andy Lack pushes on him, but overall I think he’s pretty good. Taking Ali Velshi for what he is, a CNBC pro-business pundit, he’s pretty good, in part because as he often says, he’s a Canadian and thinks our approach to health care is pretty stupid.
ETA: @Tuna: I thought she was also incredibly rude, kept interrupting the other guests. Hopefully she’ll flame out quick, but I doubt it. I suspect she’ll settle into that late afternoon stretch from Wallace to Chuck to Tweety.
Kay
I want to like her. I think she’s good at her job but the long preface to everything drives me crazy. She doesn’t have to lead so much. We’ll get it.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
They identified her body yesterday. Well, the largest part of it, anyway. They’re still looking for the rest.
Yarrow
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yes. What’s with his kind of weird chin tuck and then looking slightly upwards through his glasses at the camera? I always want to tell him to look directly at the camera. It bugs me so much I can’t watch him. He’s not as bad about that when he’s on location and standing. It’s something about his studio set up.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Is this MSNBC part of Noonan’s deillumaton or was the deillumination to get the job at MSNBC?
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I know, but I can’t even believe this is the same media it was a year ago almost. Even a few months ago the media wasn’t completely against Trump. It seems Cville and later remarks were the final straw for them.
MattF
Looks like MSNBC is striving to attain the credibility level of the WSJ editorial page. And they may (or may not) achieve it.
Doug!
@FlipYrWhig:
I forgot about Joy. I hate Larry O tho.
Doug!
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Chris Hayes’ eternal grad student persona can be wearying,
Well put
oatler.
@Kay: I wanted to like her but it started to look like she was spinning plates to keep us “enthralled” until the next block of Exxon commercials.
Amir Khalid
Jared shows up in Cairo and gets the door shut in his face.
I’m aware that Peggy Noonan and her drinking are objects of derision chez Balloon Juice. I’ve read her Wikipedia entry, which says only that she wrote speeches for Reagan and since then has been a well-regarded conservative political writer and columnist. Aside from her playing for the other team, is there a particular reason for liberals to dislike her?
Kay
Ugh. That’s much higher than I thought. It’s lower in the midwest but it’s still +/- 9% which is more than the margin between Trump and Clinton.
Lotta factors, of course, but this ONE factor would have been determinative:
I feel like they have to explain how they went from Bernie to Trump if they’re the Real Democrats :)
Boatboy_srq
@Hal: What is it about the non-wingnutty viewers that we’re not valuable to the networks? It’s not as if the Teahad has a monopoly on television ownership or Internet connectivity.
Brachiator
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Wait a minute. Is it possible that people could get good, real, legal advice from a bartender? And the picturesque bar patrons. Hmmm. There’s a spine of a good pulp thriller here.
..
different-church-lady
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Is this the part where someone says, “Actual investigative reporters? Oh my god, you’re adorable!”
trollhattan
@swiftfox:
CNN is developing something similar to a spine in response to Trumps continual attacks so perhaps MSNBC sees an opening to becomes America’s News Poodle ™.
Kay
@oatler.:
I think it’s more earnest than that- she thinks it’s necessary to explain and I don’t think it is. It feels manipulative to me, like I’m being led, like she doesn’t trust me to get there without a map.
There’s something hovering about it- she’s a helicopter pundit :)
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I consider Chuck Todd an ultimately well-meaning anchor who is fairly bad at his job and also not particularly bright.
MattF
@Amir Khalid: Noonan’s adoration of Reagan was (and, one assumes, still is) utterly abject. This was back in the day when ‘abject’ was regarded as maybe somewhat embarrassing and maybe somewhat incompatible with rational analysis. Of course, in the modern world of today, none of that counts.
schrodingers_cat
@Amir Khalid: Read her WSJ op-eds from the Obama era, you will get it.
randy khan
Lack’s motivation for some of his moves has seemed kind of obscure to me. His primary job is to make money for the network, after all, and he will stay, get promoted, or get fired essentially on that alone. So my guess is that his thinking is that he feels like MSNBC is rapidly sewing up the leftish end of the potential viewership and that he wants to broaden its appeal to pick off some of the Fox demo.
Now this seems like a losing strategy to me, for a variety of reasons, notably that people have tried that in talk radio with very little success. When you swing from one side to the other, people change channels, which is the opposite of what you want. But maybe he thinks he knows better for some reason.
rikyrah
@FlipYrWhig:
Don’t understand the LarryO hate. I’ve always pretty much enjoyed him.
I especially enjoy him on Dolt45. He mocks him every damn nite. I mean, M-O-C-K him.
I love the way that he uses words, because he has to be ‘ professional’, yet he wants to slam Dolt45.
When he did the segment on Dolt45’s non-response to Putin kicking out 755 personnel from the American Embassy..
He basically said that Dolt45 got on his knees and sucked Putin off…
But, he said it in flowery language.
rikyrah
@Amir Khalid:
she wrote for the WSJ Editorial Page.
That alone should condemn her to hell.
Miss Bianca
@Tuna:
Cool. Then maybe, just maybe, there’s going to be some entertainment value in this dog’s breakfast of a decision.
jonas
@Amir Khalid: I think a turning point was a few years ago when discussing torture and W’s war on terror, she blithly observed that we “don’t need to know” everything that happened in those dark rooms at Guantanamo or Baghram and we should “just keep walking” and not worry about it.
A low point in the already pretty dismal history of American (conservative) punditry.
trollhattan
@Kay:
They did what, now?
Cripes that’s pathological. Maybe there’s a fixed number of loudmouth New Yorker votes (and Hillary’s not from there, so…)
satby
@Amir Khalid: she’s the source of the “is it irresponsible to speculate…?” quote originally regarding Bill Clinton during the Lewinski scandal.
And all of the other derp she’s churned out over the years.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Kay:
Anytime some asshole Bernie-or-Buster starts placing ALL of the blame for Clinton’s loss on Clinton’s campaign not being in those three states, give them these numbers.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I don’t even care about them.
I will continue to point out, and I know you understand Kay…
The numbers of voters kept from voting due to VOTER SUPPRESSION..
Is 3-4 times Dolt45’s ‘ margin of victory’ in each state.
Brachiator
News show producers can be incredibly unimaginative. They go for faces instead of, say, some investigative reporters and staff, because they are chasing viewership eyeballs. And they go after the same old reliable names because these people all know each other and their agents and because people like Noonan can reliably show up and pontificate about nearly anything. No one really cares whether the person has anything worthwhile to contribute. They just need to be able to go on the air, not freeze, and babble on.
Lack and people like him also think that they can bring some of the viewers who like Noonan over to their network.
Dave
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Funny that’s what I think of Wolf Blitzer except replace not very bright with dumb as a stump.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I understand how her long azz opening segments can get on the nerves.
I guess I’m used to them, because I know that EVENTUALLY, she WILL get to the point.
Miss Bianca
@Yarrow: completely o/t, but my friend who knows Louise Linton emailed me this after we were trading mean WaPo articles back and forth:
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
Hey, who was tweeting about something going down in two weeks? Was that a week ago or two weeks ago? I can’t keep up.
trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
Take this Noonan bit for a spin.
satby
@rikyrah: but she loses people as she takes her belabored stroll toward the point. Hell, I agree with her and can’t stand how long it takes her. Pithy, she isn’t.
trollhattan
@Miss Bianca:
Whole Foods?!? Elitist.
Too bad about the wedding, missed opportunity to revel in the Pence glow.
Gator90
The palpable intensity of Lawrence O’Donnell’s loathing of DJT warms my insides.
rikyrah
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
He’s a horrible interviewer who fails to push back against right-wing garbage with consistency. He needs lessons from Joy Reid.
Good description of Velshi. They should use him for business stuff only. Last week he absolutely destroyed a Trump-ite trying to peddle the swill that Trump is responsible for the good economy. I mean, just shut him down. It’s because he knows the business stuff COLD that he didn’t allow him to peddle the lies – other reporters not versed in the numbers would have let that garbage pass.
rikyrah
ICYMI about Russia:
1. Steele revealed his sources
2. The guy putting the dossier together
a) gave all kinds of paperwork
b) did 9 hours of testimony
Major Major Major Major
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: never trust somebody with a homemade submarine.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Dave: Todd at least has a moderately developed sense of morality, so in that respect he’s significantly less awful than Chinchilla (and both are still less terrible than Halperin & Shafer).
schrodingers_cat
Haven’t had cable news for over 5 years, don’t miss it in the least.
kd bart
@satby: It’s like a James Michener novel.
sharl
This July piece, How Trump Derailed MSNBC’s Centrist Makeover, is based on the presumption that CEO Andrew Lack was brought back to the network to shore up the sagging ratings it was experiencing prior to the November election. Then Trump happened, and the ratings of liberal MSNBC programs shot up – one of the rare good things that Trump has caused, if this thesis is true.
A nimble network CEO whose primary concern is ratings – and not, say, doing stuff to keep the White House and Congress satisfied in order to approve some mega-merger or change in FCC rules or whatever (fwiw MSNBC is part of Comcast) – would change his stance with the new circumstances. Maybe there is some mega-merger or sought for changes in FCC rules in the works; I don’t know. But in the absence of anything like that, the oxymoronic nature of the phrase nimble network CEO might be the issue here. In other words, Lack (and the people who hired him) may only know how to play one note, and he has been granted the luxury of not caring that good ratings depend on him throwing out that old playbook.
Redshift
@Kay:
I’d hazard a guess that’s the percentage of Paulites, minus the ones who were hard core enough to vote libertarian in the general.
Spider-Dan
@FlipYrWhig: There is a not-insignificant portion of liberals that hate Joy Reid like poison. Not necessarily just Berners (who think she is the reincarnation of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz), but also otherwise-rational people who have bought into the “it’s about the establishment, man” smokescreen. Joy Reid does do quite a bit of punching left towards the Nader/Stein crowd, which I’m personally fine with.
Hal
@satby: I disagree. There are topics she expounds on that I know nothing about, or completely forgot the details of, so I find the backstory interesting. Maybe Maddow is over assuming her audience needs a preface before the central story, but personally I enjoy the history lessons.
Major Major Major Major
@Redshift: a bunch almost certainly went to Stein.
frosty
@trollhattan: Ugh. That ruined my morning. Thankfully, there’s only 13 minutes of it left.
Bruce K
Lemme get this straight: this is the same Peggy Noonan labeled by TBogg as America’s national vodka repository?
PST
@Kay:
I would like to think that many or most were non-Democrats voting in the primary as Hillary haters or simple Republican ratfvckers.
clay
@Quinerly: This is the point I was going to make. Yes, MSNBC is hiring George Will and William Kristol and Peggy Noonan, but they certainly aren’t Trump supporters. If MSNBC wants to be the network of “bash Trump from the left and right”, then I’m okay with that.
EDIT: Hugh Fucking Hewitt being a glaring exception.
ruemara
@trollhattan: that still makes me hurl
Major Major Major Major
@Major Major Major Major: never mind, lol. Wasn’t thinking right
Nicole
@clay: Yeah, but these commentators aren’t GOOD. That’s what’s frustrating. They’re underinformed, willfully distort facts, and, in the case of Kristol, have a really, really annoying half-laugh that makes me want to punch him.
This site became a daily visit for me back in the early aughts because while I disagreed with almost everything Cole said, I could count on him to have thought it through and if he was proved wrong, admitted it and adjusted his position accordingly. He wasn’t impervious to facts, and I appreciated getting a thoughtful view from the other side.
Then, unfortunately, he saw the light and came around and I lost my ICS (Intelligent Conservative Site). But he’s still a funny, intelligent writer and has some terrific front-pagers who are also funny, intelligent writers, so I still visit every day.
MSNBC could do better, and for less money, I’m just saying. I don’t mind watching conservative viewpoints. I mind very much watching stupid.
Redshift
@sharl: I read a piece a while ago claiming to have insight into his mindset, saying that basically, he had a strategy for increasing ratings, ratings have increased, so he believes his strategy is working, and is doing more of it, even though it’s obvious to everyone else that the increase has nothing to do with his strategy.
Very Trumpian, but also very network executive, unfortunately.
Miss Bianca
@Hal: From what i’ve been able to gather – mostly from women friends who may be liberals, but are not hard-core political junkies – a certain portion of Rachel’s audience really *likes* the long intros – it fills them in on backstory that they either never knew or had forgotten, so they appreciate the history lessons. Makes me think that if I’m irritated by them (hard to say, really, because it’s been a long time since I’ve watched her show), then maybe I’m not her target audience. : )
Major Major Major Major
@Nicole: is there a remaining intelligent conservative site?
Redshift
@Major Major Major Major:
A bunch of Berners, certainly, but I’m not convinced Paulites went that way.
d58826
totally ot and posted w/o comment from the Dixon Ill. police :
https://twitter.com/DixonPolice/status/900143233283624960
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Brachiator:
A new set of stories was woven every single night, most rooted in pathos. Compared to my joint, the bar in Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” is positively celebratory.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Major Major Major Major: The American Conservative is, I guess, not uniformly wretched? Which is probably the best we can hope for these days.
rikyrah
please front page this:
Andy Slavitt lays it out:
The current plan to hurt Obamacare by taking away money from blue states:
https://mobile.twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/900324370060632064
O. Felix Culpa
@trollhattan: Seriously? A grown-ass adult wrote that? And not in a porn outlet? Yuck.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: OMG, I’d forgotten that classic! [insert puking emoji here] For me, Noonan will always be Magic Dolphin Lady for her Elian Gonzalez column:
Fuck you, MSNBC.
geg6
@Kay:
They aren’t. They are white men (mostly) who weren’t going to vote for that bitch and who have been seething with resentment from the moment Obama was elected. I encounter them every single day and am surprised that you don’t. I have come to the conclusion that white men are getting more stupid, more misogynist and more angry every day, for no reason I can discern. The whole white working class theory doesn’t work because most of these people have good jobs or own small businesses and make twice what I make in a year, so I’m not buying the JD Vance theory on my idiot, creepy, perpetually angry neighbors.
les
Here’s the depth of P. Noonan’s analysis: among other things, she knew Romney would beat Obama because Rmoney had more yard signs in her “tony Northwest Washington, D.C.” neighborhood. She’s a complete idiot, she lost it in Reagan’s term, she has no analytic skills. She and David Brooks share a brain.
Major Major Major Major
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): it’s gotten more wretched lately. And the Catholics are annoying as fuck.
@Redshift: yeah I was just completely misreading the conversation, disregard.
catclub
@Boatboy_srq:
Not gullible enough for the scam advertisers.
Nicole
@Major Major Major Major: That is the rub- so grateful a thoughtful, smart blogger came around, but at the same time, a loss of a smart conservative voice (which says more about the moral stance of current conservatism, I think). Funny thing is, it’s Andrew Sullivan’s praising of balloon-juice that caused me to take a look at it. In retrospect, it’s the one good thing I got out of the time I spent reading the very misogynist Daily Dish, or whatever it was called back then. Not to mention, that was a lot of “View from Your Window”s I had to scroll through.
Major Major Major Major
@geg6: they’re basically Bush 2004 voters who liked old man shouty, but liked the ‘man’ and ‘shouty’ part more than his actual policies.
ET
I don’t usually watch those Sunday AM talk shows but because of events this past week I watched this weekend just to see what the talkers had to say – and she was on. I sort of felt a little sorry for her (Trump hasn’t yet killed my ability to pity. yet). Here is someone who as been a GOP watercarrier for many, many years but cannot do it for the man who shall not be named. This has to be a bit baffling for her and she seems to have a hard time with it on some level.
I will add that her TV persona isn’t quite so odious as her written word. Of course since they were talking about the man that shall not be named and she isn’t a fan, that may have something to do with how she presented herself.
O. Felix Culpa
@les:
Assumes brain not in evidence.
rikyrah
James Comey is giving the convocation speech at Howard U. , and will give five lectures throughout the year there https://t.co/NkqgPzloFV
— Perry Stein (@PerryStein) August 23, 2017
Van Buren
@Quinerly: He’s trying to duplicate the success NBC had with Megyn Kelly
Oh, wait…
Betty Cracker
@clay: True! If I had to vote one of them off the island, it would definitely be Hewitt. I cannot abide that Trump turd polisher.
Redshift
@Don Roszel: Yeah, I’ve never watched cable news as news, back to when I started with Olbermann. I listen to BBC and skim several newspaper sites for news. Other than some investigation stories from Rachel, cable news is entertainment and a partisan get-together. (And since I read Steve Benen, I know the facts of most of the stories on Rachel and Chris Hayes beforehand.)
feebog
MSNBC has a pretty solid lineup in the evening. Ari Melber is solid in his slot. Tweety then allows for an hour to shut off the TV and eat dinner. Chris Hayes, for all his wonkiness has some outstanding guests and reporters every night. If you don’t like Rachel’s long lead-in bloc it is a perfect time to go get that second glass of wine and break it up some. I am not all that excited by Larry O, and by that time most of what he has is regurgitated Hayes/Maddow, so time for regular TV or a good book.
Regarding Peggy Noonan as a contributor, ech. But I would gladly listen to her from time to time if they shitcanned Hugh Hewitt.
tobie
@Kay: I’m convinced that the Sanders’ campaign became a test case for hackers and Republican operatives to see what kinds of attacks would really hurt Clinton. People I respect repeat weird conspiratorial shit about HRC that they read on Bernie blogs. Bernie himself admitted in an unusually candid moment that he knew Russians were peddling dirt on Clinton on his blogs. We’re paying a high price for the fact that Americans can’t tell the difference between news and propaganda.
Major Major Major Major
@Nicole: yep! That’s how I got here too.
And I liked view from your window, especially the contests.
ETA: his team made a good aggregator.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: IMHO we still don’t really know if Sanders/Trump voters are, on the one hand, “economic populists” who became convinced that Hillary Clinton was too corporate and/or warmongering; or “not-particularly-ideological people who think Hillary Clinton is shady and a bitch,” who wanted to beat her up by proxy with whatever they had at their disposal and as many times as possible. Do we know if they were also voting for non-Hillary Democrats or for non-Trump Republicans? We can draw different conclusions about a Sanders/Trump person who’s also voting for Feingold or Strickland than from a Sanders/Trump person who’s also voting for Ron Johnson or Portman.
Quinerly
@Van Buren:
Not really. Peggy has been around a long time and they aren’t giving her an entire show. I can’t stand her but she has name recognition with conservatives that aren’t necessarily RWNJs who watch Fox. If a WSJ reader is flipping around and catches a glimpse of her, that reader might stick around and hear the other panelists. Same with Jen Rubin. Just can’t get myself exercised about it unless they give her an entire show. Greta, Megan, and Hugh are another story.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: I believe she’s also the coiner of the phrase “Is it irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to.”
ETA: The Reagan’s-happy-shoe thing is even beyond the fuck-nuttery of Elian Gonzalez’s magic dolphins.
Major Major Major Major
CNN alert says “paperwork and talking points are ready if Trump makes a final decision to pardon” Arpaio.
Quinerly
@rikyrah:
I love this!
And to clarify this…I love it because it will burn Trump.
Peale
@Kay: Well, from what I recall, Trump said he hated NAFTA which made him “to the left of Clinton” economically and Trump said he wanted to spend on infrastructure which put him to the left of Clinton economically and of course he said he wanted to end the H1B programs which was even more to the left of Bernie economically, apparently. Plus he was against all wars in the past that had become unpopular, which made him a belligerent peacenik. Practically a hippy. And he pointed out in his closing argument that there were bankers who he’d defeat. Sure he’d just defeat the jewish ones, but a good anti-semitic bank screed is almost as leftist as being a against income inequality and neoliberalism.
dww44
@PST: I agree with you. A lot of Bernie Sanders voters here in my state weren’t Democrats to begin with. A lot of them were young millenials from strong Republican households. It is disappointing, but not surprising, that they would have voted for Trump in the general. It’s more of the distrust the institutions of government including those who may have just recently been elected to serve in the government.
Redshift
@catclub:
Very good point. It’s always important to remember that it’s not an accident that the conservative movement is rife with grifters, or that the base fervently believes whatever wingnut media tells them, no matter how obviously nonsensical. The conservative audience has been carefully cultivated for gullibility since Weyrich’s direct mail lists in the 1970s, precisely because they could also be exploited for commercial profit.
tobie
@FlipYrWhig: I checked Kay’s link to the twitter feed where she got the info. If I’m reading it correctly, the demographic that switched from Sanders to Trump were younger voters. Party identification among the 18-20 bracket is low. I don’t think they were turned off to HRC because she was a woman. I think for that age bracket the ‘corporate shill’ line was decisive. Don’t know what the party can do moving forward.
Quinerly
@clay:
And the bashing from the left and right is what I see MSNBC doing.
Major Major Major Major
@FlipYrWhig: yep. The number I really want to see is how many Sanders > Trump voters voted for Feingold.
@tobie:
Not promote non-party-members who use republican talking points as attacks on the leading candidate, perhaps.
dww44
@Hal: I’ve my own theory. Lack is creating a platform for all those disaffected Republicans who formerly had a voice at Fox, like George Will. Then there’s the obvious fact that on every nightly show there are always conservative Republican voices with equal access to the microphone as the liberal ones.
Face it, Lack himself is a most likely a golf club sort of Republican. Never googled him, and don’t know his background but he’s running that network like he truly wants to move it right. And, he’s obviously succeeding. It will be interesting to see how it pans out when Trump is no longer around and serving as a unifer of sane conservatives with always sane liberals. Will MSNBC then become the respectable Republican platform? I’m afraid that’s what’s going to happen.
les
@O. Felix Culpa:
Well, yeah, I assume some kind of brain. Single track, limited function, clearly not capable of running one thought process, much less two. I’m a generous kinda guy.
Quinerly
@Miss Bianca:
?
Matt McIrvin
@les: Like Maureen Dowd, Noonan is obsessed with whether any given male political figure is or is not manly. (She has recently turned against Trump because, she’s decided, Trump is weak and effeminate.) Only Noonan’s guiding star is Ronald Reagan, the manliest man who ever lived.
Nicole
@Major Major Major Major: You’re right; TDD was a good aggregator, for a brief period. Then his misogyny wore me down. Well, that and I saw him too often on the talk shows and was always left thinking, “This guy is an asshole.”
geg6
@rikyrah:
He used to get on my nerves, but he’s been amazing since Dolt 45 took the reins. Like you, I love how he mocks him without using any sort of bad language. And the look of glee in his eye when he does it.
geg6
@satby:
The magic dolphins carrying Elian Gonzalez was the absolute peak Peggy.
Raoul
Super frustrating. But I sort of assume it’s because far too few people under 50 even watch TV. Sure, they watch Maddow clips on their phones, but not whole hour long news/chat shows on a broadcaster’s schedule.
Now, there are liberals over 50, and MSNBC is screwing up that outreach, but the money demo is probably more conservative than the average BJer.
So, we view them swirling towards the drain, like all of cable. Buh-bye. Sad!
The Moar You Know
@geg6: It’s because everybody is getting squashed up against the wall of poverty. No legit raises for workers in this country since the 1970s. Inflation…well, the numbers are the numbers but I go to the store and I’m getting a lot less for my dollar than when Bush was president, even. So everyone’s getting killed in the pocketbook, and white workers are shocked to find that they’re no longer on the exempt list. They never were, but they haven’t paid attention until some orange maggot pointed it out to them.
So now they’re mad, and they’re going to fly that flag until made to quit. Everyone else, they’ve always been on the short end of the stick, and protest for those folks can have lethal consequences, so they don’t.
Given that our economy is now firmly in the hands of the .01%, I don’t see the end of the white male temper tantrum happening for the rest of my life. Which could conceivably be at least the next thirty to forty years.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I like the evening lineup. Lawrence brings a certain gravity, BW usually has interesting panels, Hayes is younger and fairly sincere, and Rachel is edifying and passionate. Yes, they all have flaws as do any journalists we might name. Joy is objective and professional and an excellent fill-in.
Nicole
@geg6: Truth. I grew up in South Central PA, and yeah, I am very familiar with the type you describe. I posted on FB, months ago, a bit about how even though the US didn’t see fit to make a woman the leader of the free world, we ended up with one anyway (Angela Merkel). A FB friend from Erie lost his goddamn mind over the post and wrote the unhinged ramble that started off with “NO SHE ISN’T” and ended with some sort of “BUT HILLARY’S EEEEEMMMMAAAALLLLZZZZ BENGHAZI WAR HAWK” ramble I couldn’t even follow. There is no fragility quite like a white male Keystoner fragility.
I feel bad for his wife, although they dated for quite awhile, so I guess she knew what she was getting into. (Also, Erie. Slim pickings.)
Patricia Kayden
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Raoul
Also, too, one suspects that David Roth would be a far far better regular on MSNBC. But they decided to be a ball-suckingly tragic with all the conservative huckster payola, so we’ll have to make due with reading him.
Nicole
@The Moar You Know: Except that, as geg6 said, a lot of these men AREN’T economically challenged. I grew up not far from where she is, and people were not struggling then, and they’re not struggling now. They’re just really, really misogynist and racist. I made excuses for them for many years, because I love my hometown, but I can’t make them anymore.
FlipYrWhig
@tobie: If not “bitch” then still “shady”/”corrupt” merging with “inauthentic.” I feel like a huge part of the Sanders boomlet wasn’t “finally a Real Leftist!” but rather “he’s pissed off! Like no-shit pissed off! About… stuff! Like me!” And it’s unfortunately pretty easy to see how that could carry over to voting for Trump. At least it seems unlikely that such a person would fall for that _again_ when Trump runs for reelection.
Kenneth Kohl
@FlipYrWhig: I agree about Joy Reid. I absolutely love O’Donnell. I think Ari Melber will be very good.
After watching Noons for a few minutes yesterday, I was reminded what a twit she is – absolutely useless.
Redshift
@dww44:
I’m not so sure. Van Susteren was canned very abruptly midweek, presumably for failing ratings. (A friend who does tech work at NBC said they had the guests booked for the night it was cancelled.)
The ratings bump from being the anti-Trump channel is propping up his “both sides” strategy. If Trump goes or the bump fades, I don’t think populating the channel with conservatives will stop a ratings decline, and he’ll be out.
tobie
@Peale:
I’ve given up hope of ever having an intelligent discussion of trade in this country. The last election proved that to me, and it is what also turns me off to Elizabeth Warren who demagogues the issue when she knows better. Maybe we will have to go through massive economic contraction to experience, yet again, why protectionism doesn’t work.
Sab
@rikyrah: Basic question is why does Andy Lack have a job? What does he bring to the table. We know his negatives. What are his positives?
Miss Bianca
@tobie:
Ain’t that the truth. But I would argue that this is part and parcel of Americans’ overwhelming tendency to confuse symbol for substance. The hyperventilation over flag-burning, for example.
tobie
@FlipYrWhig: This strikes me as plausible. People were really, really angry in 2016 and wanted to tear things down.
J R in WV
@Amir Khalid:
An incoherent lack of logic?
No usage of facts?
Well known for her worship of fascist speeches by high government officials?
I can scarcely bear to read any of her published short work, it’s the written version of Trump’s speeches. Better grammar, a little, barely. And uses the proper words except when she intends to mislead, which is mostly..
rikyrah
Dr. Frankenstein didn’t like his creation, either
08/23/17 10:20 AM—UPDATED 08/23/17 10:41 AM
By Steve Benen
Donald Trump has spent a chunk of August publicly feuding with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), with the two Republican leaders trading thinly veiled rebukes. It’s all part of one of the year’s less expected political food fights.
But privately, it’s reportedly much worse. We talked earlier about this New York Times piece, which raises the prospect of Trump obstructing justice by expecting McConnell to intervene in the investigation into the Russia scandal, but at a more basic level, we’re also learning that the Senate Majority Leader doesn’t appear to have confidence in his party’s president.
………………………..
The Times’ article added that McConnell has privately marveled at Trump’s unwillingness “to learn the basics of governing.” The Senate GOP leader has also “expressed a sense of bewilderment about where Mr. Trump’s presidency may be headed.”
McConnell’s concerns are obviously grounded in fact, and on the surface, it’s tempting to feel some sympathy for him. But it’s important not to lose sight of the senator’s role in making the mess he finds himself in the middle of.
Like Dr. Frankenstein, McConnell created a monster he thought he could control, only to discover he doesn’t care for the results.
FlipYrWhig
@rikyrah: Under Obama O’Donnell never seemed to find his footing. He wasn’t sure if he was doing leftier-than-thou critique or world-weary How Washington Really Works critique. The whole thing had a bit too much insider focus on celebrity from NY, LA, and DC for my tastes. It was basically the Huffington Post front page given awkward life as a person. IMHO he’s been much better since the dawning of Trump.
Kelly
Off Topic.
4 more Bundy accomplices found not guilty. The realization that juries do not consider heavily armed crowds of right wingers confronting cops a crime chills me to the bone.
rikyrah
If you haven’t seen these seven minutes with James Clapper, you MUST… and if you already have, see them again. https://t.co/sR4mLJYxGQ
— Fernand R. Amandi (@AmandiOnAir) August 23, 2017
Kay
10 hours! He must have a lot to say :)
J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
Oh, yes, I forgot that!
Is she racist, or does she just hate black people? Whocantell ???
Redshift
@The Moar You Know: And the most annoying part (which has been the most annoying part for decades) is that the only thing that’s going to stop runaway income inequality is reversing anti-union laws and policies, stronger government, and redistributive tax policies, the very things they’ve been trained to vote against because Those People are the real cause of all their troubles.
Miss Bianca
@geg6: I *finally* get the Dolphin Lady reference! I must have been passed out from too many vodka martinis to have absorbed this piece of Magical Bullshit Woo-Woo Realism back in the day .
James Powell
@geg6:
I’m not saying those guys don’t exist because there are quite a few of them. But they are not alone. There are an awful lot of women who respond to Hillary Clinton with a passionate hatred and they are not all Republicans.
Major Major Major Major
@Nicole: I think their rage stems mostly from entitlement. Remember that a lot of them are young(er)(ish). They want what their Boomer fathers had, where they could, with little education, get a well-paying union job in a factory or whatever without having to move somewhere that would question a lot of their assumptions about their place in society. But those jobs aren’t there any more, if they even exist stateside anywhere at all. They would have to learn and travel, and they don’t want to, so they blame all the other people who’ve entered the workforce since their dads were their age.
We can talk until the cows come home about where those jobs went and whose fault it is, but they aren’t actually angry about trade policy or robots.
germy
J.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Did they learn NOTHING from the Greta experiment?! (Apparently not.) Fuck MSNBC.
BC in Illinois
@Amir Khalid:
For me it was her take on torture:
Avert your eyes and keep on walking.
mai naem mobile
Ive always liked ODonnell. He can get away with being snarky but still look professional because,I believe, of his age. Hayes would never get away with what ODONNELL does. Also, Nicole Wallace and Ari Berman are really good. Chuck Todd is smart but pulls his punches all the time because he’s kissing up to management and trying to keep access to GOPrs. I remember watching Todd when he used to come on CSPAN when he worked at Roll Call. BTW, Todd got his start working in Tom Harkins office so I have never believed he’s some Republican media whore.
Miss Bianca
@Kelly:
Me, too. I wonder if it finally chills enough *cops* to the bone, to the point where they actually start pushing back on the NRA “absolutely everyone has the right to bear arms all the damn time”, whether we’ll actually see any rollback of these open carry laws. Oh, who am I kidding…!
trollhattan
@Redshift:
Colbert’s ratings took a dramatic uptick after he decided to shed the velvet gloves WRT our new president and go after him hammer and
sickletongs. Perhaps our news divisions can take a few lessons from their entertainment divisions.Hal
@rikyrah: ok, I definitely did a double take on the artile’s author’s name.
Kay
Job search tip! If anyone wants to be a school bus driver now is the time. We have to cut close-in routes because we can’t find drivers. I don’t know nationally but here you’re part of a bargaining unit and it is not that bad a job.
IF you want to be a school bus driver. Don’t feel compelled :)
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@Hal: Lack is very uncomfortable with anything the slightest distance past the mushy middle, and even the mushy middle makes him a little anxious. He didn’t want to give O’Donnell a new contract this year.
The best plan I can find is to mock Nooners extensively and unflatteringly online, and tag #NBC and #MSNBC every time you do. Because that will attract the attention of people other than Andy Lack, and help undercut any arguments he may have in favor of his new hire.
trollhattan
@Kelly:
It’s a sickness, peculiarly if not exclusively western, that guns endow extra heapings of authenticity upon those who tote them for fun, profit and/or making political points. We’re at the mercy of an angry minority in much of the region. With that I’ll share this bit of awfulness.
These are not good people.
Nicole
@Major Major Major Major: But these aren’t the folk geg6 and I are talking about. The ones I know, because I grew up with them, are doing quite well- they are police officers and own car dealerships and work as defense contractors (god help us). They aren’t struggling at all. They have boats and take vacations and are, if anything, doing better than their dads did. I do think there is a rage at a loss of entitlement, but it’s being entitled to view women as objects and black Americans as inferior. And it makes white Christian America really, really uncomfortable to confront that. So we talk about jobs and economics because that doesn’t make white men feel threatened. They can nod at the paper while on their boat on the weekend and tell themselves that if “those people” just weren’t so lazy, they’d be succeeding, too. And then they post a picture of a fat chick on their FB page with some snotty comment about her.
God, I grew up with some HORRIBLE people. I need a shower.
Peale
@tobie: Hard to draw out anything, I guess. Hillary one first time voters nationally, by a large margin. Those tend to be younger. We had hoped that there were going to be groundswell of first time naturalized citizen voters especially older Latino and Asian immigrant first time voters who suddenly turned up to vote against Trump since participation rate in those groups is very very low. But that didn’t happen. So we have this cohort of young voters who maybe might be democrats or might not be. Its worth looking at them since they did vote for a nominally democratic candidate once. And they did vote at least once in a general election which means they are more likely to be coaxed back to the booth again in the future than someone who sat out the election entirely.
Citizen Alan
@Amir Khalid:
You may be aware of the commonly used in joke here at BJ wherein someone speculates rather wildly about the worst possible interpretation of what a republican is just done and then says “Is it irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to!”
That’s from Peggy Noonan, and she said that unironically and in absolute seriousness after suggesting that the Clinton administration sent Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba only because Castro knew about Monica Lewinsky at was blackmailing Bill Clinton.
That is certainly when I became aware of Peggy Noonan and learned that contempt was the only rational response to her idiocy. Though if I remember correctly, the late great Molly Ivins tore into her a few times years before that.
The Moar You Know
@Kelly: It should scare the shit out of every cop in this country, but most of them think that they’re on the same team (Team White) and that they’ll get a pass. History shows that they won’t, and that they won’t learn the lesson this time either.
Frankensteinbeck
@The Moar You Know:
I’m sorry, but analysis of Trump’s voters, their opinions and how those opinions change over time, and watching the path of Republucan craziness over the decades all make it clear that this is not about economic anxiety. They’re being pushed by the increased visibility of minorities. When the economy improved during Obama’s tenure, when he specifically gave them health coverage, they didn’t calm down. They got steadily more batshit. I know inequality is a problem, but our situation is driven by racism, not plutocracy.
@rikyrah:
This is especially funny, because one of the book’s major points was that the monster and Frankenstein had basically the same personality. The doctor made life in his own image, and hated it.
frosty
@Nicole: I’ve been wondering how I got here. Sully must have been the link. At the time I called them both Recovering Republicans. Clearly one recovered better.
tobie
@Kelly: A friend of mine said that he realized just how bad things were when a jury failed to convict any of the militants who took over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. In hindsight, I think he’s right. That was the wake-up call.
geg6
@tobie:
You don’t know many white 18-20 yo males, I’m guessing.
Citizen Alan
@Kay:
Do any of those states have open primaries? I’d assume lots of Republicans would have crossed over to vote for Bernie if they were able to do so simply to weaken the Democratic nominee as much as possible. We all know the GOP had a reams of opposition data on him that they were holding back just in case a miracle happened and he was so how able to snatch the nomination away from Hillary.
schrodingers_cat
@James Powell: Many voters who vote their feelings felt like they had eaten their spinach by voting for Obama twice, so they were just expressing themselves by voting for JS, not voting for President or worse of all voting T.
Another Scott
@Hal: They still have a tiny audience (from July 24):
The power of Fox News isn’t the masses of people who watch it, it’s that they control the narrative by being watched by the GOP lawmakers, etc., etc. MSNBC’s management apparently wants to top them in that demographic, so they want (at least a few) big name GOP operatives, and that’s why Joe still has a job and why they keep hiring “big names” from the days of the Reagan administration….
They don’t care if 100,000 more 20-somethings watch in the middle of the summer. It’s peanuts. It’s a rounding error for them. They’re not going to hire Lefty McLeftish even if they do get more viewers that way. They want to get more power to drive the narrative, and they think the only way to do that is to appeal more to the GOP machine. That’s why Chris and Rachel and all the rest have Teabaggers on as guests so often these days.
That is all. (IMHO)
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who fully gave up watching MSNBC a year or more ago.)
Citizen Alan
@MattF:
She was one of his top speechwriters. IIRC, she wrote one of his few genuinely moving and apolitical speeches, the one he gave after the Challenger disaster in which he talked about the slain astronauts as “slipping the surly bonds of Earth.”
rikyrah
@Kay:
And said…..
that he’s ok with the committee RELEASING THE TRANSCRIPT.
Peale
@Citizen Alan: Yep. Also was a true believer in the myth that Elian was protected by dolphins and that the dolphin miracle meant that God wanted him to remain in the US.
Major Major Major Major
@Nicole: I guess I was responding more to several threads than yours in particular. Or maybe I continue to be bad at reading this morning. Those people are also a big slice of Trump voters, and definitely awful.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: 100,000 isn’t a rounding error in those figures, unless you’re rounding to the nearest 20%.
Miss Bianca
@tobie: That was definitely a WASF moment for me.
DougJ
@schrodingers_cat:
Me neither. I watch at my parents and at the gym sometimes
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Nicole:
I suspect they were bullies and mean girls as teens and never fully developed. Their level of immaturity, their utter lack of self awareness suggest personalities that did not reach full development. Plus, of course, they are vile racists.
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major:
That grafted middle finger from Trump is way too big for his tiny hands.
Irony Abounds
Noonan is a dolt, pure and simple. I like Maddow, but she drives me to scream at the TV or XM radio as she takes FOREVER to get to the point. It is one thing to try to lay proper foundation, it is another to drone on and on endlessly and use up 10 minutes to explain what could have easily been done in about 4.
trollhattan
@Irony Abounds:
It’s part nerd effect, part having N amount of time to fill with N/2 material at hand.
Nicole
@James Powell: And see, this is the thing that has been making me really, really uncomfortable- it’s a knee jerk need, when it’s pointed out that a shit ton of white men are pretty racist and sexist to say “But what about white women?” Hell, there was a piece about notable women in the white supremacy movement that used as its reason for being that while obviously the overwhelming number of Charlottesville marchers were men, there were a few women so now let’s do an entire piece about two or three women who were prominent in white supremacy movements. I am a daily visitor to The Root and verysmartbrothas (now part of The Root) and there are plenty of times I have to sit on my fingers to keep from commenting (as a white reader, I think my role is to read and go away and think about what I read) because the things said about white women as a group can be hard to read, as they are much uglier and more specific, than the things said about white men. Actually, come to think of it, there are articles about white people as a whole and white women, but seldom, if ever, white men as a specific group (they will write pieces about specific white men). It doesn’t make me not want to read the site, as it teaches me a lot and challenges my own biases, often uncomfortably so, but it reminds me that our lizard brain reaction as a society, is to look for ways to focus blame on “the other,” and the only group that is consistently never “the other” is white men.
I get that there are women who hate Clinton, too- having a vagina does not immunize the brain against the effects of 25 years of the media Cliinton-bashing. But rather than really asking men to take a look at misogyny and how it shapes our culture, it’s easier to pivot to, “But some women don’t like Clinton either! It must be something WRONG WITH CLINTON. OR WITH WOMEN. But not men. No, of course not. Of course they’d hate her. That’s just the way things are.” (Yes, I know this is not exactly what you said and I am exaggerating for the sake of making a point)
I’m well aware that 53% of white women voted for Trump, just as I am aware that Hillary got more of the white women vote than Obama did (so… some white women are racially prejudiced, some are misogynist, and some are both. Did I cover it? Oh, wait… #notallwhitewomen. There. Now I covered it). And I’m certainly not accusing you of being misogynist. But we live in a very, very androcentric culture (girls playing soccer! Great! Boys knitting! Oh….um….), and we are all products of that culture. And so I think, when the fingers of blame get pointed pretty directly at white men, our culture has shaped us such that we look for someone else to blame, if not entirely, then at least, “too.” And there’s a real push to blame women when that’s possible.
I guess I would just respectfully ask folk, before leaping to, “But what about the 53 percent of white women who voted for Trump?” to take a moment to really take in that 63% of white men did. Just because it’s what we expect of white men doesn’t make it okay.
Nicole
@Major Major Major Major: Oh, no worries. I enjoy reading your comments and was happy for a chance to engage directly.
Major Major Major Major
@Nicole: Aw, shucks.
Nicole
@frosty: Well, one of them actually likes women (I’m not referring to sexual attraction; that’s different than “liking”). I think a genuine like of and respect for women aids in the recovery effort.
Mike in NC
Andrew Lack is such a hopeless douchebag he’s probably doing his best to bring Bill O’Reilly to MSNBC.
Librarian
@Another Scott: I don’t know about Chris, but Rachel and Lawrence rarely have people who disagree with them on as guests.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: Hey, some of us are eating lunch here! Ugh.
lamh36
@tobie: to be clear as we have already seen by the new young, dumb and stupid “Alt Right” phenomenon just because they are a young person doesn’t mean they aren’t still susceptible to misogyny and bigotry.
Heck aren’t a majority of those anti-woman tech guys in the news lately “young” people?
Miss Bianca
@Nicole: Word.
trollhattan
@Nicole:
Confess I can’t unpack everything you wrote but will repeat myself since the Reagan days that Republican genius hinges on their ability to get people to vote against their own best interests. One of their tools is catalyzing deep-seated gender, socioeconomic and racial biases.
tobie
@lamh36: You’re likely right. I stand corrected. My comment was based on my experiences phone banking for HRC in WI (albeit from my home in MD), which is not a representative sample.
NorthLeft12
Peggy “I’ll have another” Noonan? It is beyond frightening to me that there is some demand for her “insight” on the political issues of the day.
And that goes double for her creepy male doppleganger, David “Effing” Brooks.
schrodingers_cat
@Nicole: What do you expect really? A cookie for doing the right thing? BTW most of the Bernie or Bust people I knew where white women, in their 50s and 60s. I should also add there was one black woman in that group.
sharl
@Another Scott: So much about this MSNBC story takes me back to the earlier version of MSNBC which fired Phil Donohue. There are some different circumstances (e.g., the Chris Matthews role back in 2003), but also some big similarities.
I keep forgetting to follow through on looking for interviews and backstories on how the script and plot for the movie Network came to be. It is as spookily, disturbingly spot-on about the dynamics of network broadcasting as it was when it first came out.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Can’t think of an example recently, but a few years back Maddow used to regularly invite (troll) Liz Cheney on air and repeatedly. She once did a segment where she snakily took potshots at Claire McCaskill, and lo and behold, who should pop up a few days later but CMC herself, who’s a lot of things I don’t like but I don’t think she’s a coward. More recently, she had Conway on for an extended interview; I couldn’t watch cause I hate that woman as much as I hate trump, and Maddow warned in advance it was going to be civil and fact-based,’there will be no blood on the floor’, I think was the way she put it. From the clips I saw, she very coolly made Conway very uncomfortable. And probably not coincidentally, Conway has not been back.
FlipYrWhig
@Irony Abounds: Is that the way you feel about the Rachel Maddow openings? Is the way you feel about them, that? Are you feeling that if there were to be a way, among all the ways to feel, right, that, while you were wondering how you might feel, that you could feel a certain way, a way that would be similar, right, to how you feel about it? Well the story we are about to discuss will leave you feeling like there could be a new way to feel. We have new details and we’ll share them in a few. That’s coming up, and, trust me, you’ll want to know them. Stick a pin in that. But before then, let’s take a step back and think about how you used to feel about them. In 1977… AAARRRHGHGHGHGH MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP
It’s all those recursive loops that do me in.
Librarian
@FlipYrWhig: I don’t mind Rachel’s openings as much as I mind the endless commercials and teasers. I still like Rachel, with all her faults, but I like Lawrence more. He really hates and despises Trump.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: Not in those figures, but in TV audiences in general. 38+M watched Obama’s acceptance speech in 2008. Yeah, special event vs. daily viewership. But still.
Tennis Channel supposedly has the richest audience demographics, but has a (relatively) tiny audience.
Cable TV “news” is tiny and has outsized influence. It can’t be because of the audience numbers – it’s too small. It has to be who watches, not the size of the audience. And we know that the demographics of who watches Fox News is much older than the treasured “18-35” group that advertisers supposedly want, it pretty much has to be the GOP leadership and political noise machine watching that makes it so valuable.
So, if that’s what’s really driving the value of cable TV “news”, then it’s not surprising that MSNBC would chase that, also too.
That’s my theory, anyway.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tenar Arha
@Kay: That’s funny because I like the long lead in with historical background. I like history, plus I grew up being lectured this way by both my parents so I suppose it hits my “this is familiar” buttons. But the “it’s strange, it’s weird, this is odd, this is unusual” flourishes on top of the rhetorical questions tend to bug me because it drives me to distraction when I do it myself.
ETA I just wish there were more people that were good enough to explain politics, history, & policy at her level. Then there’s be more presenters who could do what she does & we could pick from a variety of presentation styles.
Another Scott
@Librarian: Ok. I have to admit that I don’t have a good recent survey.
Normally, I’m happy when shows aren’t echo chambers. But Rachel often seemed to be walking on glass when she questioned Rep. Scott Rigell (one of the first if not the first GOP congressman to be on her show). Chris Hayes didn’t look too comfortable questioning GOP people either the couple of times I vaguely recall him interviewing someone from that side. (On the other hand, when he’s talking with people he likes on a topic he’s enthusiastic about, he jumps in and talks over them with abandon.) The GOP doesn’t lack outlets to get their messages out, though, so if they’re being questioned from the left, the questioner should not be afraid to ask probing questions.
It’s no big deal – they’re good at their jobs and have lots of talent. It’s just not for me any more.
Cheers,
Scott.
patroclus
I could do without Nooners. I guess I disagree with most here on Rachel – I like her, but I’ve begun to find the first 18 minutes of her show nearly unwatchable of late. She repeats herself and repeats herself and gives us “background” that is painfully obvious and not needed and then repeats herself. She could accomplish all that in about 5 minutes and then move on to non-Trump news items very easily. (Did I say she repeats herself?) Maybe I’m just bothered by her repeated reference to William Gibbs McAdoo as the “Klan candidate” in 1924. They supported him, but he didn’t support them and there’s quite a bit more to McAdoo than the ’24 convention, including as Treasury Secretary, as RR Administrator, as the guy who put FDR over the top in ’32 and as a later liberal Senator from California. If Rachel is going to waste 18 minutes repeating herself, perhaps she could have spent 10 seconds giving far more background on McAdoo than as the “Klan candidate.”
sk7326
Hayes tries to cover more ground than Maddow does – and more stories which tend to not get coverage on primetime. His old Saturday show was the best cable news program in recent memory (and it’s really not close). Hayes current show forces him into the conventions of cable yakfests – which he soldiers through, but he clearly is interested in more things than that. The weaknesses in his show reflect the (thanks Finding Forrester) constipated thinking of TV execs with properties like a prime time cable news show.
frosty
@Nicole: I grew up with them too and they’ve made HS reunions difficult. I escaped after high school but find myself back in South PA again. I’ve worked the polls since 2004 and I’ve never seen so many angry old white people as I did in 2010. Or resentful first-time / irregular voters in 2016 (you can tell because they have to show proof of residence).
Counting down to retirement when I can escape again, for good this time.
Ralphie247
@Bruce KLemme get this straight: this is the same Peggy Noonan labeled by TBogg as America’s national vodka repository?:
The one and only.
God I miss Tbogg.
Mwangangi
Y’all didn’t disappoint @dougj
Ralphie247
@Librarian: For the longest time, Rachel would complain that she had a hard time booking Republican righty types as guests. I suppose some of them were reluctant to appear on TV with a liberal lesbian because it might imply approval of her lifestyle. Times change.
Villago Delenda Est
OK I’ve at least skimmed the entire thread an no one got Dougj’s Steely Dan reference? For shame!
Another Scott
@Villago Delenda Est: Some of us thought it was too obvious to mention. >;-p
Cheers,
Scott.
The Lodger
@dww44: Lack himself is a most likely a golf club sort of Republican
Specifically, a niblick.
Tehanu
@Villago Delenda Est:
I got it, but since I love Steely Dan and loathe Peggers, I wish Dougj had used something else — say, “Stupid Hoe.”