What
use are Sunday morning news shows in our post-truth political era? Four
days after Mitt Romney lied his way through his debate with a listless,
diffident President Obama, and two days after former GE CEO Jack Welch
ousted Donald Trump to become Mayor of Crazytown on Foursquare,
journalists and campaign surrogates had a lot of decisions to make:
Would conservatives escalate, backing Romney and Welch? Would liberals
fight back more effectively than Obama (OK, that’s an easy one)? And
would reporters on the panels lapse into easy “both sides do it”
equivalence and ignore the way the Republican campaign, including Welch
and Romney himself, has ratcheted up the prevarication and character
assassination to new levels?
To keep from drowning in despair and
nihilism over what the Sunday shows tell us about the bankruptcy of
American politics, Salon is bringing you Sunday Best: Our choice of the
best moment of all on the top Sunday shows. (We may occasionally have to
turn to MSNBC’s “Up With Chris” or “Melissa Harris-Perry,” but if we
put them in the mix every week, it wouldn’t be a fair fight. We’ll
mainly focus on the productions of the big networks.)
This Sunday, there were plenty of good moments.
Predictably,
Democrats fought back better than Obama did, with Robert Gibbs calling
Romney’s performance “fundamentally dishonest” and his budget math
“absolutely crazy” on ABC’s “This Week.” On Fox, Maryland Gov. Martin
O’Malley told Chris Wallace, “The fact of the matter is in this debate
we saw Big Bird meet the big lie.” Also on “This Week,” Paul Krugman
told the panel, “The press just doesn’t know how to handle flat-out
untruths,” which led Mary Matalin to absolutely lose her shit and call
Krugman himself a liar.
You have mischaracterized and you have lied about every position and every particular of the Ryan plan on Medicare,
from the efficiency of Medicare administration, to calling it a voucher
plan, so you’re hardly credible on calling somebody else a liar.
Actually,
Mary, Romney himself admitted it was a voucher program on Wednesday
night. Someone’s lying here, and it’s not Krugman. Digression: Paul
Krugman probably deserves the Sunday Best award for simultaneously
fighting off Peggy Noonan’s gauzy, shimmery fantasies and untruth, along
with Matalin’s sharp and ugly lie-daggers, on the very same show. But
Krugman would probably win it every week, which wouldn’t be fair.
Things
got even more interesting when it came time for Republicans to defend
Romney and Welch. On “Meet the Press,” Newt Gingrich took the unusual
strategy of declaring, “I think it’s clear he changed” his tax policy, a
change he described as “good politics.” Yet Romney hasn’t come out and
said he’s changed his tax policy; he’s only saying that his tax cuts
won’t cost $5 trillion because of all those loopholes and deductions
he’ll close – you know, the ones he won’t tell us about.
Republican
strategist Mike Murphy, also on “Meet the Press,” didn’t deny Romney’s
tax-slashing plans, he took the tack of defending Romney’s refusal to
enumerate the loopholes and deductions he’d eliminate in order to raise
the tax burden of the rich – because such details would hurt Romney
politically.
Here is the problem. You guys won’t give
him any credit for closing loopholes, because like you guys, he won’t
name the loopholes. Why? Because you’ll attack him for doing it. You
attack him for not giving you a little target… and then you attack him
when you get the target.
Remember, that’s also why
Romney told us he won’t inform the voters which federal programs he
plans to cut. So Murphy and Romney are basically admitting that the
Republican nominee’s actual policies are so unpopular that if he told us
what they were, he wouldn’t get elected.
On Jack Welch’s claim
that Obama’s “Chicago” campaign cooked the BLS numbers to make
unemployment go down – he famously tweeted, “Unbelievable jobs
numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change
numbers” – Gingrich took the position that Welch’s charge was
“plausible,” at least. “It rings true to people. You have a president of
the United States so deeply distrusted by people like Jack Welch — who
is hardly a right-winger, Welch is one of the most successful
businessmen in America — that Welch instantaneously assumes this is the
Chicago machine.”
Not surprisingly, Peggy Noonan, also on “This
Week,” took a similar dreamy “reality has a well known liberal bias”
approach to what James Carville termed “economic birtherism.” Noonan
proclaimed from on high, “I don’t think anyone in America looks at that
number and thinks ‘that’s reality in America.’” Really, Peggy? You’re
the arbiter of reality? Reality is what Peggy Noonan feels America
feels? We’re all in trouble.
But Gingrich’s spew inspired our
Sunday Best, when NBC’s Chuck Todd lashed back. Todd can sometimes seem a
captive of the Beltway, but on Sunday he staged a prison break, going
off on Welch and Donald Trump and formerly respectable business leaders
for their vicious insanity. See the video below, starting at 09:00:
“This
is really making me crazy,” he told his “Meet the Press” friends. ” The
Federal Reserve gets questioned now for politics these days. The
Supreme Court and John Roberts get – we have got, we have corroded –
what we’re doing, we are corroding trust in our federal government in a
way. And, one-time responsible people are doing it. And the idea that
Donald Trump and Jack Welch, rich people with crazy conspiracy theories,
can get traction on this is a bad trend … We have mainstreamed, ‘when
did you stop beating your wife.’”
Certainly I’m not endorsing
putting the politics of the Federal Reserve or Supreme Court off limits,
but it was great to see Todd object to the mainstreaming of crazy by
“one-time responsible people.” That’s the Sunday Best for this week.
One
final debate note: I’m not a fan of “both sides do it” journalism, but
to be fair, while there’s no equivalent of economic birtherism on the
left, there is a kind of ”debate trutherism,” where fervent Obama
supporters, especially on Twitter, explain that the president was once
again playing 18th-dimensional chess and intentionally blowing the
debate only to win it somewhere down the line, drawing out Romney’s lies
with his somnolent performance. Um, no. Obama blew it, big time.
Thankfully,
the campaign rejects debate trutherism. “The president is his harshest
critic,” David Axelrod told “Face the Nation.” The debate about the
debate is over. If we don’t want to say Romney “won” because lying
should disqualify you from a win, let’s just say Obama lost. And move
on.
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