Defending the indefensible, the NRA blows its load

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The NRA's chief gun fetishist and bullshitter, Wayne LaPierre, was on Meet the Press yesterday and -- surprise, surprise -- objected to any and all gun control efforts. (Watch below.)

He also defended the NRA's "universally panned call for armed guards to be stationed at every school in the country." Because, you know, there's no problem that more guns can't solve.

For once, it does seem that the NRA and gun nuts generally are facing a fight they simply cannot win, a tide of public opinion that will ultimately prevail.

Oh, maybe they'll win in the short term because there are more than enough Republicans in Congress to block meaningful legislation, but it's just so obvious now that they're defending the indefensible and that their extremist absolutism is essentially murderous.

Maybe, sadly, it took the killing of 20 young children in Connecticut to wake everyone up, but maybe that's the silver lining of that horrific tragedy.

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John McCain to meet the press... again

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Via twitter: 

Sunday I'll talk with WH Senior Adviser David Plouffe and 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain on the economy and #Decision2012.

-- David Gregory (@davidgregory)

John McCain? Seriously?

What exactly does he bring to the table at this point other than senility, the impression of being somewhat less crazy than the rest of his party (which is true), and the ashes of the faux maverick reputation he rode self-aggrandizingly to Beltway media belovedness?

And whatever will Meet the Press do when he's done? Three possibilities: 

1) Continue to wheel out his embalmed corpse every Sunday morning; 

2) Bump up every other conservative white male on their guest list, which is the vast majority of the list, so as not to skip a beat; and/or 

3) More Newt!

I see all three as equally likely. And I think we're likely to see all three.

Keep up the great work, DG!

NBC's David Gregory to be keynote speaker for right-wing pro-Republican organization

By Michael J.W. Stickings

NBC's David Gregory, nowadays mostly of Republican-leaning Meet the Press fame, one of the Beltway media's most prominent figures, will be Tuesday's keynote speaker at the 2012 Small Business Summit, an event hosted by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) -- which, as Think Progress notes, is:

one of the Republican party's strongest allies. The group spent over $1 million on outside ads in the 2010 campaign — all of it backing Republican House and Senate candidates (and, Bloomberg News reported last month, "another $1.5 million that it kept hidden and said was exempt" from disclosure requirements). The group is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Obamacare law and bankrolled state governments' challenges to the law. The NFIB has also taken stances against allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, opposing regulations on businesses, and supporting curtailing union rights.

So much for journalistic integrity. So much, as usual, for the "liberal" media.

(photo)

When Newt fucks up...

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Newt is a real piece o' work. Getting slammed by many of his fellow Republicans for criticizing Paul Ryan's anti-Medicare plan, which has become a cornerstone of Republican orthodoxy, the various stages of Gingrich's response to the criticism has provided us with an open glimpse into the mind of a shameless political opportunist who fucked up badly and is trying desperately to right the ship.

Apologizing to Ryan, and to Republicans generally, on his knees begging for forgiveness, was the partisan price he had to pay.

But a simple mea culpa isn't good enough. Now he's taken to lashing out at the most obvious target, a target the GOP loves to abuse, namely, the media. (Stewart and Colbert both tackled this last night, hilariously. The funniest part may be that Gingrich, claiming it was all a mistake, says that quoting (accurately) what he said, say, in an ad, would be "a falsehood" -- see clip below. Of course, Democrats would be stupid not to quote Gingrich, and it looks like they'll do just that.)

It's not just that he now says he never should have answered the question, it's that he's blaming the media for what happened, that, for the shitstorm of his own making. He accuses Meet the Press host David Gregory, hardly a gotcha sort of guy, of setting him up, as if he'd never ever ever been on that show or anywhere else on TV, as if he was just some innocent victim who had no idea how Washington works. Meanwhile, his press secretary, Rick Tyler, accuses the media more broadly:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment's cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won't be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

It's hard to cram that much incomprehensible bullshit into a single paragraph, but there you go. (Honestly, do you have any idea what any of that means? The "literati" and their "minions"? And the violent metaphors? An "onslaught"? The guy's apparently insane.)

And so Gingrich goes from being Republican heretic to hero in the span of just a few days. But will anyone buy it? I suspect not. His campaign may not be over yet, but he's gotten off to a terrible start and this whole ridiculous episode -- which, remember, started with him actually saying something that made sense and that many of us could applaud -- will stay with him as long as he stays in the race. Even if Ryan and others in the party accept him back, the base won't be so ready to forgive. 

Dick Armey on Meet the Press

By Creature

He was rude, disruptive, dishonest, and bat-shit crazy. In other words, exactly what you'd expect from the head Teabagger.

Ethnocentrism on Meet the Press

By LindaBeth

Today's Meet the Press featured David Gregory's interview with President Karzai of Afghanistan. The last question posed to Karzai was regarding the legality of marital rape under Afghani law.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

It is important to watch the clip rather than read the transcript, because Gregory's tone was nothing less than ethnocentric. Gregory is questioning the democratic-ness of Afghanistan because of this law's passing. He might as well have called Afghanistan a "so-called" democracy for having passed an anti-human rights law.

Clearly, making marital rape legal is an egregious human rights violation. However, as so many Americans have been shocked! outraged! at this Afghani law as was Gregory, perhaps a history lesson is in order:

Marital rape was legal in the United States in all 50 states until 1976. Marital rape has only been illegal in all 50 states since 1993. And only 17 states make no legal distinction between marital and non-marital rape in terms of legal charges, sentencing and defensibility. And Raquel Kennedy Bergen writes in her paper, "Marital Rape: New Research and Directions":

However, in 30 states, there are still some exemptions given to husbands from rape prosecution. In most of these 30 states, a husband is exempt when he does not have to use force because his wife is most vulnerable (e.g., she is mentally or physically impaired, unconscious, asleep, etc.) and is legally unable to consent (Bergen, 1996; Russell, 1990; NCMDR, 2005). Because of the marital contract, a wife's consent is assumed.

This begs the question: Who are we to "primitivize" Afghanistan for legalizing a heinous act that in our own country was not fully illegal until 15 years ago?

And if having no legal civil or human rights violations is the measure of whether or not one is a democracy, then for the majority of its history, the United States has not been a democracy, and perhaps still is not one.

(Cross posted to Smart Like Me)

Meet the Press: same as it ever was

By Creature

Newsday's TV Reporter, Verne Gay, thinks Meet the Press "is now the de facto safe show on Sunday morning" since David Gregory took over. Really?

The problem? Actually, problems. The new moderator often seems like he's wearing a suit made for someone else - Russert - and as a result has yet to clearly establish why he got this gig instead of anyone else in the conga line of potential successors. Gregory is terrifically polished, well-informed, a good listener and has the talking points of both sides down cold. But he also seems more intent on covering the waterfront than digging for news, or in pushing the talking heads off their talking points.

I agree with Verne, "pushing people off their talking points" is not a Gregory strong suit, but, then again, I don't recall Russert knocking many people off theirs either.

Just ask Dick Cheney.

David Gregory: "goofily hollow"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

That's Mickey Kaus's assessment of new Meet the Press moderator David Gregory (quoted favourably by Slate's TV critic, Troy Patterson, in his own assessment of Gregory), and I generally agree:

How bad a choice was Gregory? Let me put it this way: I've heard George Stephanopoulos say interesting things. I've heard Tom Brokaw say interesting things. I've heard Mort Kondracke say interesting things. I've heard David Broder say interesting things, and Norah O'Donnell and David Gergen and Gwen Ifill and even (once) Sam Donaldson. I heard Tim Russert say interesting things. I've never heard David Gregory say an interesting thing.

Well, I don't agree about Kondracke, who seems to lack a soul, and I don't much care for Broder and his CW centrism, and I'm not a big Ifill fan, and O'Donnell's a bit vapid, but I get the point. I don't think I've ever heard Gregory say an interesting thing either, and his reporting on the presidential race was mind-bogglingly banal and shallow.

What's worse, though, is that Gregory is an all-too-eager, all-too-pleased-with-himself Beltway insider who, as Patterson puts it, "[embodies] the coziness of the political class" and who is "delighted to be in the club." Forget hard-hitting, independent journalism. Forget even the tiresome "gotcha" journalism of Russert. At the grand and ironic theater that is American politics, Gregory, like so many other Beltway insiders, doesn't so much sit in the audience with us, the people, monitoring, reporting on, and ultimately holding to account the actors on stage, as prance around on stage with the actors themselves, as with Rove in '07, one of them, not one of us, the Fourth Estate fully co-opted by the powers-that-be, itself a power that is. Adds Patterson:

Last week, when Tom Brokaw formally announced that the 38-year-old was taking over a show that we're obliged to acknowledge as an institution, Gregory panted with humility while never managing to extinguish the self-regard that animates his on-air presence. This aspect stands in contrast with the projected warmth of his predecessor, the late Tim Russert. It probably makes no difference to the show's content, but the new face of Meet the Press wears a contented smirk.

That "new face" with the "contented smirk" might be around for years and years and years, on Sunday mornings and on election nights and whenever else NBC wants to be thoroughly uninteresting and, whether it knows it or not (and it likely doesn't), part of the problem.

Obama on Meet the Press

By Creature

He does a very good job of explaining things. It's refreshing.

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)