Liberal Lesbian Pundits Are Just Everywhere On TV, Man

MSNBC is giving Dan Abrams' slot after Keith Olbermann's Countdown to Air America's Rachel Maddow, and I think that's a good thing. BooMan kindly reminds us that it's still a cable news show and not to get too excited...

It's like a new Wendy's opened in town and people celebrated because they wouldn't have to eat at McDonalds anymore. You shouldn't consume fast-food...ever. It is terrible for your health. The same is true of Cable News.

Yes, every once in a while the Cable News channels will air a debate or forum that is safe for human consumption. But most nights they provide the equivalent of a balloon of nitrous oxide. If you hooked your cranium up to a scanner you could actually see the brain cells dying as you watched the pundits perform their circle jerk.

But on the other hand, Double G reminds us that frankly, the best (and only) way to improve the vapidity of cable news is to give it more viewpoints other than the processed crap we're fed en masse. Of course, the Village is SCREAMING that Maddow now represents unfortunate (and intolerable) partisanship on MSNBC's part, and G-Man uses his kung-fu upon it.

For years, cable news -- well beyond just Fox -- has been suffuse with the hardest-right ideologues. Virtually every Karl Rove disciple not formally with the McCain campaign is now employed in some capacity in the media. Dan Bartlett just joined CBS News as a "political analyst", and just today, Time announced that it has hired Mike Murphy, GOP strategist and former chief McCain adviser, as a new columnist and new poster at Swampland, and he promptly wrote a column filled with trite Rovian platitudes about how Obama is "irresistible to the wine-and-cheese lovers" but can't connect with the salt-of-the-earth working-class People who "reminds them of the Ivy League whiz kids they've dealt with at work during the latest downsizing."

Ever since MSNBC's extremely suspect and viewpoint-based cancellation of Phil Donohue's Show in the run-up to the Iraq War, it's been almost harder to find an actual liberal on cable news than it is to find a Marty Peretz post free of ugly anti-Arab smears. Yet the ascension of Keith Olbermann -- who is far more a Bush critic than he is a doctrinaire liberal -- by itself spawned a cascade of panic. Olbermann's success at MSNBC means that Modern Journalism is now threatened because -- as AP put it -- "Olbermann's popularity and evolving image as an idealogue (sic) has led NBC News to stretch traditional notions of journalistic objectivity." AP even asserted that Olbermann's status as a news anchor means that MSNBC is even more biased than Fox, which at least has the decency to keep a non-partisan, serious news man like Brit Hume -- who only explicitly spouts extremist right-wing rhetoric on Sunday -- as its anchor: "Fox has never done that, perhaps mindful of the immediate controversy that would result."

It's the fact that Olbermann, Maddow, and MSNBC are the conspicuous holdouts from the Village idiocy, and they must be attacked until they fall in line. It's hysterical and actually quite sad how when faced with yet another GOP talking head nobody says a word, but add one more liberal and it's a shame how "partisan" cable is in the age of FOX News.

Glenn sticks the fork in.

Maddow is unquestionably one of the smartest and most incisive commentators anywhere on television -- perhaps the smartest. One would think that the presence of smart commentary in the wasteland known as "cable news" would be cause for celebration among those super-Serious intellects at TNR. Zimmerman even brings herself to recognize that Maddow's "no mere histrionic provocateur" and "has proved herself to be a savvy commentator with quick, smart takes on the news of the day." But no matter. She's a liberal -- and, therefore, to the Tucker-Carlson-loving Sacha Zimmermans of the world, her mere presence is likely to infect and degrade our political discourse with shrill, overheated, fringe, sickly partisan rhetoric -- "refusing to acknowledge anything but spite, paranoia, and conspiracy theory when it comes to the other side."

The reaction to Maddow's show highlights just how suffocatingly narrow, and right-wing, the spectrum of mainstream political discourse in America is. Hiring Michael Savage, Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson to host their own shows didn't jeopardize NBC's news brand, just as giving Glenn Beck -- Glenn Beck -- his own show didn't jeopardize CNN's. Most mainstream political and media figures even continue to insist that Fox is a legitimate news organization because Brit Hume confines his overt right-wing talking points to the Sunday show. But the presence of a liberal on MSNBC instantaneously destroys traditional principles of Journalism.

But beyond that, the reaction also highlights the pitiful pretense of high-minded objectivity that people like Zimmerman have adopted in order to glorify themselves. Laced throughout Zimmerman's oh-so-saddened lament about the loss of sober journalism, "iconoclasts" and "nuance or intellectual rigor" is that it is people like Zimmerman and the trans-partisan, oh-so-unpredictable and intellectually vibrant TNR that we need more of -- people who rise above "this trend toward partisan networks and news." Liberals like Maddow are plagued by a partisan agenda that precludes deep and free thought, in contrast to the high-minded "iconoclasts" at TNR who prove their independence with their friendships with Jonah Goldberg, endless praise for National Review commentators, and publication of articles glorifying and praising Ann Coulter. So unpredictable and intellectually vibrant and iconoclastic.

Personally I'm looking forward to Countdown and The Rachel Maddow Show...just because it annoys the Village. Anything that causes this kind of reaction before it's even on has to be worth it.