In a lengthy, skillfully written article, a liberal Trump foe writes that MSNBC’s Russia-collusion-obsessed Rachel Maddow can be as “bonkers” as chalkboard-loving Glenn Beck.
“Jacob Bacharach at The New Republic drop-kicked the MSNBC host in a brutally honest assessment of the nutbag conspiracies Maddow has been shoveling out on her show for the last two years,” the Gateway Pundit observed about the cable network’s biggest star.
In a ratings grab, MSNBC and CNN operate like a 24-7 anti-Trump infomercial in which they convinced themselves that Trump colluded with Russia. CNN has covered that narrative with the same (or even more) fervor that it did with the blanket coverage of that missing Malaysian airliner.
During his tenure at the Fox News Channel, Never Trumper/Sometimes Trumper Beck became famous for outlining elaborate conspiracy theories for his audience on a chalkboard. Traditionally, conspiracy theories gained traction among right-wingers, promoting widespread ridicule.
Originally conceived as a placeholder before it became a permanent FNC fixture, The Five replaced Beck’s show in July 2011.
Note that U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham has quipped that President Trump doesn’t even collude with his own government, an allusion to the reality that the POTUS frequently differs fundamentally with the political establishments of both parties.
The Liberal Democrat Cable Channel
In Bacharach’s article about Maddow and prime time colleagues called MSNBC’s Wild Ride, which you can read in its entirety to get the full context, he describes the network’s principal host as more appealing than he anticipated, less funny than she thinks she is, and smart.
But he goes on to write the following about the network’s conspiracy mania:
“’Bread crumbs’ are emblematic of the informal house style at MSNBC. The channel has a range of on-air talent, and its shows each have their own cadence and feel, but they are joined across the arc of each daylong cycle of programming, and especially the larger meta-cycle of the Russia investigation, by a kind of Sherlockian, my-dear-Watson zeal. We are discovering the clues, uncovering the documents, connecting the threads, following the trail in the forest. A mystery is a puzzle to solve, but a conspiracy can only produce more and more mysteries…
“The prevailing criticism of Maddow’s on-air personality is that she embodies the stereotype of the smug liberal, and if you encounter her mainly through the brief video clips that are both the reputational currency and the lingua franca of online media, it’s easy to see why…
“[T]he defining trait of the show, which more than any other has contributed to Mueller’s near-messianic hold over segments of the so-called Resistance—a movement that was caught by surprise when Mueller finally submitted his report in late March, apparently concluding, from what we know of the report as of this writing, that Trump and his aides had not conspired with Russia to steal the election. Maddow’s prime-time hour of overheated speculation lacks the antic sensibility and maudlin sentimentality of, for instance, the pre-exile Glenn Beck, who had scribbled all his manic and intricate chalkboard theories of history as conspiracy (and vice versa) with the studied passion of a coffee-shop prophet. But Maddow—and much of her network these days—is frequently just as bonkers…MSNBC has become what, just a few years ago, critics thought impossible: the liberal, Democratic cable channel….”
CIA Conspiracy TV
The author also chided the previously civil-liberties-devoted left for its newfound worship of the Deep State as long as it is targeting Trump:
“[I]t leads directly to a central problem with contemporary mainstream liberalism: the idea that the trouble is not so much institutions themselves as the people who run them. The result is an unfortunate tendency to rehabilitate dubious people and organizations the moment they line up against the right villains. How else to explain the sudden liberal affection for the FBI, the office of the special counsel, the ‘intelligence community’?”
Parenthetically, left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald has dubbed MSNBC and CNN as “CIA TV” for pushing the Russia collusion delusion.
Dumbing Down Liberals
Watching conspiracy TV MSNBC every night could you make you dumber, Bacharach also suggests:
“The danger, however, is that it is possible to make MSNBC your principal source of news and information and, as a consequence, to escape knowing much of anything about what is going on in the world. It is possible to watch an entire primetime lineup without mention of Brexit, of the gilets jaunes, of any Eurasian politics beyond the bogeyman Putin and some snarking at Trump’s vague China tariffs…And as a consequence of this narrowness of interest, it is possible to believe that getting the president of the United States, whether through impeachment, indictment, or just beating him in the 2020 race, will be a social and political panacea, that it will set aright most of what ails our society, and that we can return to a version of an already idealized Obama era, with a graceful grown-up reassuring us that cooler heads will inevitably prevail.”
The media/Democrat collusion complex also seems curiously disinterested in the fact that China is expanding its economic, cyber, political, and military tentacles all over the world.
Prominent Democrat: Investigate the Investigators
On the subject of delusions, former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey, a war hero who also served as Nebraska’s governor and ran for president in 1992, warned his fellow Democrats in an Omaha World-Herald Op-Ed that they are suffering from two of them:
“The first is that Americans long for a president who will ask us to pay more for the pleasure of increasing the role of the federal government in our lives…The second Democratic delusion is that Americans were robbed of the truth when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and Attorney General William Barr concluded that President Trump did not collude with Russia in 2016. All evidence indicates that the full report will not change the conclusion that Donald J. Trump did not collude with Vladimir Putin to secure his victory in 2016.”
Famous for describing Bill Clinton as an “unusually good liar,” Kerrey goes on to call for a full investigation of [not his words] in effect how/why the Obama FBI colluded with Clinton campaign to spy on and/or undermine Team Trump using a fake Russian dossier as a pretext:
“Rather than investigating the president further, Congress needs to investigate how the Department of Justice got this one so wrong. If the president of the United States is vulnerable to prosecutorial abuse, then God help all the rest of us…Our democracy will survive the hostility of Vladimir Putin. What it may not survive is distrust of our system of justice. At the moment that distrust is deep and wide. We need a nonpartisan national commission to tell us what has just happened and to advise us on what we need to do to keep it from happening again.”
Trump Derangement Syndrome Is Real
Approvingly citing Kerrey’s essay, New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin points out that increasingly radical Democrats are nonetheless very slow learners and will probably disregard the “truthful Democrat’s” advice:
“The problem, of course, is that all leading Democrats are drinking the Kool-Aid that America is ready to embrace extreme, left-wing policies and that Mueller and Barr are covering up for Trump and Vladimir Putin. This is the stuff of moon bats and tin-foil hats, yet if there is a major Dem in power with the courage to say so, I’ve missed it. The whole party, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi included, seems determined to hold hands and jump off a cliff…
“Much has been said about what is provoking the party’s lurch to madness, with the inordinate power of small social-media mobs and the dumbing down of college education being obvious contributors. But I remain convinced that the most comprehensive explanation for all the weird behavior is that it is a deeply misguided response to Trump.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome is no joke — it is driving the opposition to make irrational and even insane statements and decisions. While some of the reaction has to do with Trump’s unorthodox conduct and habits, much of it is due to the simple fact that he has produced significant achievements for the country, something Dems never expected and can’t digest. While success in politics usually spawns imitation, Trump’s success shocks his opponents and provokes them to behave in bizarre, self-defeating ways…
“In political terms, 2020 is light years away. But with Mueller having spoken, and with leading Democrats trapped by their continuing delusions, the point of no return is growing closer by the day.”
Journalism Groupthink
In the clip below, left-wing Trump-Russia collusion skeptic Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept, told FNC’s Tucker Carlson about the anti-Trump media echo chamber that “they actually want you, to maintain your good standing on the left, to lie. They’re demanding you lie; they’re demanding you say you see evidence and you see a convincing case for a conspiracy theory even if you don’t really see it.”
[Featured image credit: Eric Susch, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 license]
