I turned on ABC’s This Week to see if the host could get anything useful out of Governors Jindal of La. and O’Malley of Maryland. I wasn’t expecting much, but it’s usually interesting to see what each party thinks the most helpful spin is. What we got is a confirmation that America is now saddled with the two worst political parties we’ve had in my lifetime. Both men were awful, but host Terry Moran was even worse.
I’ve watched a few thousand political shows in my life, but this one was beyond the pale. Host Terry Moran, one of the least serious “reporters” in D.C., is simply not qualified for the job; he staged a food fight, or a mud-slinging festival, as though his job was to the carnival barker introducing clowns. It was awful, just awful.
If you put two hacks on and all your host does is invite each of them to run on at the mouth for a couple of minutes, followed by another minute of “responses” egged on by terrible follow up questions, you will get nothing more than a run-on rendition of each Party’s talking points. That means it’s useless, a waste of time. Why did you bother, ABC? All we heard was a torrent of unrebutted lies, misrepresentations, political spin and name calling. Moran’s contribution was to ask absurd follow up questions, which proved only that he doesn’t have a clue.
If you’re going to interview party clowns like these, you don’t do them together. You isolate them, slow them down, break their spiel into bite size pieces and then pin them to answer at least one or two key questions that illuminated whether there’s anything of substance, or it’s all just empty rhetoric. Here are some sample framings for questions that should have been asked about the economy but weren’t:
To the Dems’ O’Malley: we have an Administration that inherited an unmitigated catastrophe, and economy in free fall. It tried to do some of the right things to stop the free fall, but it pulled its punches across the board and refused to consider more dramatic changes to an economy whose dominant players — mostly Wall Street banksters — are looting the middle class and the poor. You’ve held no one accountable. You’ve left the looters in charge. You’ve coddled the banks and the insurance companies and they’re still looting the country while the middle class is dying. Your proposal to help the housing market have failed, because they protected banks more than homeowners. Why haven’t you tried to stop that? And why should the American people give you another chance? What would you do different, and why should people believe you will follow through?
To Jindal: Your party created the catastrophe, the worst since the Great Depression; the results are a complete repudiation of your core beliefs. But now you’re in denial about it and are proposing policies identical to those that created the catastrophe. Moreover, your candidate is the examplar for the corporate and personal greed that is looting the country and taking jobs from Americans. Even worse, your Party has done everything it could to obstruct every possible measure that might prevent more layoffs, create jobs or help the jobless deal with their struggles. You’ve refused to help states and local governments facing devastating budgetcuts, refused to prevent hundreds of thousands of layoffs, refused to help the unemployed, slashed food stamps, refused to help the uninsured, and threatened even to deny coverage to those who have become or could be covered by the ACA. What’s your excuse for such unChristian (unMuslim), inhumane policies? And isn’t it true that if a foreign enemy waged war against the American economy as your Party has done, we would declare all out war on that enemy and imprison the lot of you? Why should Americans allow you anywhere near government?
It would be impossible to sort out what these three bozos actually said. My best advice to the country: try to forget anything this stupid ever happened, and don’t show it to the children.
Oh, and the panel. George Will told us the reason we’re setting hundreds of temperature records and Colorado is on fire is because of . . . “summer.” Why, he can remember summer as a kid; it was hot back then, too. That’s it.
Years from now, people will play the videos of George Will’s stupidest comments, and this will be in the top ten, maybe the top five, and there’s lots of competition for those top spots.




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What we got is a confirmation that America is now saddled with the two worst political parties we’ve had in my lifetime.
The Democrats are the worse of the two because at least the Republicans, when in power, do the very things that as candidates, they say they will. Democrats go back on their campaign promises, betray their strongest supporters, and repeatedly act with weakness and incompetence in the face of Republican intransigence.
The only pleasure I get watching these shows are seeing tools like George Will scrunch up their weasel faces when a Left Winger (that term is relative with regards to the Right Wing talking heads crowd) say something they can’t stand.
Nailed it. I fear the R’s because they will do what they say they will do and I fear the D’s because they won’t.
I am reminded, happily, that my TV has a channel selector and an off switch.
One of the elites said on Meet the Press today that the new American Dream is no longer owning a home but to get a job.
Wow. Didn’t think they told the truth on those Sunday shows.
Terry
MoranMoron. There, fixed it for you.Nah, Moran fits
Mort Zuckerman’s bizarre answer to whether global warming was real or not where he reveals we Americans should start dreaming about having a job
As long as people keep turning on that shit, they have no incentive to change. Networks don’t care if you like them, just that you watch them.
To Jindal: Your party created the catastrophe…
You need to wake up to the fact that the idea the Republican Party created the economic catastrophe that came crashing down in 2008 all be themselves is just wrong. And it is.
NAFTA was Bill Clinton. The repeal of Glass-Steagall? Bill Clinton. The Commodity Futures Trading Moderinzation Act (which gave us unregulated derivatives including credit default swap “insurance” where the buyer of the insurance needed to have no insurable interest in the instruments they were betting against)? Bill Clinton.
De-regulation mania has been a fully bi-partisan enterprise. Both major parties worship at the altar of (the myth of) the free market.
How about taxation? Clinton cuts cap gains, and Dems still believe in cap gains cuts. Hell, Dems believe in tax cuts as stimulus (public rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.)
You’re diary here was about Moran and ABC, but your throwaway line (“Your party created the catastrophe…”) when opening up on Jindal strikes me as a symptom of a larger issue, that issue being in the “us versus them” Democrat versus Republican political dynamic, way too many Democratic supporters are holding onto some idealized notion of what their party is, what it stands for and somehow as a result still delude themselves that the meltdown was all the Republicans fault.
The catastrophe of 2008 was many years in the making, and the cooks that baked up that awful pie came from both sides, especially post-Reagan (but to some extent, beginning with Jimmy Carter, even before that.)
But that is his job.
Climate change is a political issue? Right, it is if your a f*cking moron/Moran ( no pun intended.)
Riiiiight…. And Cap’n Crunch cereal is both tasty and nutritious. Give me a break! Just because one can be more disappointed in the Democrats doesn’t mean they are “worse” than Republicans. Maybe in your world but not in the one I inhabit. You see, in my world, I never believed Obama was remotely progressive but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that many of the people who are now claiming he’s worse than every Republican ever spawned are the same people who used to call me “racist” and “right wing troll” for daring to point out that Obama wasn’t even as “progressive” as Bill Clinton. I’m not in any way happy with where the Democratic Party is but saying they are worse than Republicans is empirically absurd.
“…Democrats are the worse of the two because at least the Republicans, when in power, do the very things that as candidates, they say they will. Democrats go back on their campaign promises, betray their strongest supporters…”
Yup. Most people know the GOPers are whores for the rich. But the Democrats have their (long forgotten) New Deal legacy, so they feel compelled to at least talk like they care about average people, which always makes them look like sellouts once they get in power and whore for the rich.
They are the party of fiscal responsibility and smaller government, right? No. Just no.
I stopped watching these “shows” years ago and I feel much better about Sunday. These shows are toxic and don’t contribute to any real understanding of what’s really going on in this country. democrats, republicans – who cares? They’re both corrupt.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the Democratic Party has negative value, and we’re better off without it. The party not only kills progressive ideas, but stands as a barrier to the formation of a truly progressive party. It has killed internal dissent (imagine the party mandarins’ reaction to a Tea Party movement from the left) and, at the same, has all but killed external dissent such as the Occupy movement.
“Disappointed” doesn’t begin to describe my feelings toward the Democratic Party. I used to think they were the 1962 Mets, the worst team in major league baseball’s modern era. I now believe they’re the 1919 Black Sox, eight of whose players took bribes to throw games. To Hell with them.
For 30 years George Will has expounded on things he knows nothing about. He was only mildly close to ” knowledge ” when he wrote about baseball. But it was mostly a rehash of statistics, with no real memorable insights on the playing of the game, whatsoever. He is truly the little league’s version of the right fielder; the last guy you’d choose in a playground pickup game. As for his effete attempts to explain conservatism he continuously sides with the owners of the team. Hoping, against all odds, to be chosen for right field at least. I tried in vain to title his columns ” More Swill From George Will ” for years. But to no avail; he still gets to write his own headings. In the words of George himself, ” More’s the pity. “
Pet Peeve: It is no less incorrect to look at an atypically hot summer and say “global warming” than it is to look at an atypically cold winter and say “global warming isn’t real”.
This approach – seemingly ubiquitous among the politically focused – obviates the corollary response when, as statistics tell us is likely to happen, we hit a patch of record-breaking cold winters. Both sides are doing it because the approach has a political impact – but from the pro-science side, it seems to reduce somewhat the potency/credibility of challenging “cold winter” assertions when they inevitably occur.
Science is on the side of man-made-forcing being a significant factor in warming trends. That doesn’t mean that every assertion of those who accept this likelihood is equally scientifically valid.
Shorter Scarecrow:
x2
Haven’t read your entire post yet, but was compelled to comment on 2 things…
Easily true.
Here’s where I run into trouble. No one, but no one, can take a political show beyond the pale like David Gregory. He has no peer.
Now, back to the top.
“. . . Here are some sample framings for questions that should have been asked about the economy but weren’t:. . .”
———————-
That’s the problem with Sunday morning talking head shows (or any other day of the week).
If you ask a meaningful question that the visitor doesn’t like he/she won’t come back to the show, and his/her friends might decline as well.
The purpose of these shows is to attract advertisers, pay the hosts, and keep the crumbs rolling through on stage with their stupid answers to milquetoast questions. Nothing more.
Scarecrow, while you were watching that and your blood pressure was rising, I was outside watering my tomatoes and weeding.
Also if you must watch, I recommend recording it on the DVR and watching when its over. You can click through the commercials and reduce an hour to about 40 minutes. Still crap for content, though.
There are two purposes to these Sunday shows:
1. Spew the propaganda of the elites to the masses
2. A showcase for corporate America, ie an easy way to let the elites know that their money is doing well (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, GE, Pfizer, etc.)
If these pundits had to exchange ideas and analysis with people that actually knew what they were talking about, the pundits would pout and demand that they not have to talk to such guests. Many of the people here that write, even just comment, would cut them down and cause the show to go off the air. Remember when Jon Stewart came on the program Crossfire and tucker carlson whined and then the show was cancelled? The bosses don’t want that again.
Right on. Time is a very limited personal resource. Best thing I ever did was junk my TV, although I kept the device itself for old VCR tapes.
I do find it worthwhile to stay abreast of the spins, but I can do that with NPR while driving.
The internet has rendered commercial TV totally extraneous and a waste of money.
I don’t know Margret, I don’t know what “empirically” is supposed to mean in this context.
The Republicans are what they are. They are the ‘ying’ to the ‘yang’. In the case where ‘yang’ goes all ‘ying’ on it’s wards then that leaves us defenseless; it’s betrayal, and there’s little worse, IMO, than betrayal.
I don’t think that, from their point of view, the Republican party engineered a catastrophe. They engineered an opportunity to crush the middle and working classes and revise our expectations for the future. We’re supposed to be a nation of renters who have certifates from online ‘colleges’, no real prospect of upward mobility for ourselves or our childre and no retirement security. From the Republican (and Democratic and Obaman point of view) the rich won. And that’s a good thing, not a bad one.
Book Salon up with Hannah Gurman’s The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond hosted by Michael K. Busch
seems to me both parties’ positions were NAILED, along with George
Will’s stupid answer. What’s your beef?
here’s the link to the Jindal/O’Malley exchange
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/gov-martin-omalley-mitt-romney-bet-against-america-with-swiss-bank-account/
this whole movement of “a pox on both houses” that I see on this website quite often makes me believe that many commentors and writers are not reality based.
Do the dems suck ? yes, they do. Are they the same as the rethugs ? not by a longshot.
and if you believe your life and future are basically the same no matter which party controls your destiny, you are not living in reality.
I posted the link to illustrate that O’Malley is doing exactly what O’bama and Co. should have been doing since day one. Sticking the facts in the face of the rethugs and make them squirm (Jindal)
O’Malley is exactly what a progressive wing of the Dem party needs in terms of leadership.
Is the ABC show a joke ? Yes. Are all the corporate media shows a joke ? yes.
That’s not the point. If you believe that a Romney presidency is not going to be any different than an Obama presidency, well you’re way off base. Maybe you think your job is secure, your salary is secure, and it doesn’t really matter what Pres. Romney and his Tea Party Congress come up with. If yo believe that you are sadly mistaken.
Who says your college degree allows you to earn higher than minimum wage ? Mitt doesn’t think so.
Do you think your SS benefits and 401K accounts are going to be around after a Romney presidency ? think again.
Get over the Obama disillusionment. Obama is the fluke, progressive principles are still carried by many in the Dem establishment, O’Malley for one. So my comment to the author, don’t display your ignorance so casually.