Where’s the outrage?/If it’s Sunday, it must be irrelevant: For whatever reason, a fever seems to have broken.
It’s Monday morning, and Steve Benen hasn’t yet advanced any ludicrous claims about the guest lists on yesterday’s morning news programs. For the record, yesterday’s guest lists tilted Republican, in part due to activity on the GOP candidate front.
To wit:
Newt Gingrich did the full half-hour on Face the Nation. He fared rather poorly with Bob Schieffer, who gave birth to a small angry cow about Newt’s account at Tiffany’s.
Paul Ryan was featured guest on Meet the Press. He was asked to react to Gingrich’s multiply-withdrawn attacks on his budget plan.
Herman Cain was featured guest on Fox News Sunday. That said, we would guess that this programdoes tilt Republican in its guest lists, though we’d want to see a serious analysis before we reached that judgment.
Despite yesterday’s tilt toward GOP guests, Benen has lodged no complaints. Two weeks ago, the guest lists tilted Democratic, rather strongly—and Steve crazily said that the programs had favored the GOP, by a 3-1 margin. Needless to say, Rachel Maddow repeated this ridiculous claim on two separate Maddow programs. You could tell that the darling child was quite angry about this bad thing which occurred.
This morning, Benen has made no complaints about yesterday morning’s shows. This is unfortunate, because we thought David Gregory did a very poor job in his session with Ryan.
Alas! Gregory interviewed Ryan for a 16-minute segment. (For the program’s full transcript, click this.) But he asked no questions, none at all, about the contents of Ryan’s budget plan. He only asked about the politics: Would Ryan himself run for the White House? And this: “How much damage has Newt Gingrich done to your effort to reform Medicare?” And this: “Why don't you see more Republicans who want to be the country's leader, standing up and saying, ‘I am for the Ryan plan, full stop, including Medicare reforms?’ ”
Quite thoroughly, Gregory thrashed through the politics. But at no point did he ask Ryan to discuss the substance of his plan.
For our money, this was a fatuous, wasted effort. Benen has made absurd complaints about past Sunday shows. But he has offered no thoughts about this.
For the record, Gregory also interviewed Ryan on April 10, the first Sunday after his budget plan appeared. (On that occasion, Obama adviser David Plouffe was Gregory’s featured guest.) Even on that earlier program, Gregory asked few questions about the contents of Ryan’s proposals for Medicare and Medicaid. Since that time, the contents of the Ryan plan have become extremely controversial. But on yesterday’s program, Gregory didn’t go there at all.
If it’s Sunday, it must be pointless! But the liberal world’s intellectual leadership tends to be just as weak as that of the mainstream press corps. Two weeks ago, our leadership made ridiculous claims, when there was nothing to gripe about.
Yesterday, nothing at all! But then again, so it has gone for lo, these many years.
Racism fails to rear its head: We were also struck by Benen’s account of Herman Cain’s kick-off speech. Here’s part of what he wrote:
BENEN (5/22/11): By some estimates, as many 10,000 people showed up for [Cain’s] announcement speech, which is pretty good for a strange right-wing activist with practically no support in national polls.
As implausible as his campaign appears to be, it’s probably a mistake to completely dismiss Cain as a joke. He’s a favorite of the Tea Party crowd, and apparently has the ability to impress Republican voters in debates. National Journal ran a piece recently highlighting five reasons folks shouldn’t underestimate Cain’s chances, and while he’s obviously still the longest of long-shots, the argument wasn’t absurd on its face.
For what it’s worth, that crowd estimate may have been quite high, though Benen didn’t know that. But please note what Benen said here: According to Benen, Herman Cain “is a favorite of the Tea Party crowd!” This is strange, because Cain is black (a point Steve didn’t mention)—and because we liberals are constantly told that this same crowd hates Obama because he is black!
Could it be that they hate him because he’s a Democrat? Or would that kill all the fun?
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