With the broadcast networks routinely sliding Presidential speeches off to their cable sisters, I parked myself at MSNBC for this evening’s run-up, Bush speech and run-down.
Obviously, Keith Olbermann, who last Friday beat Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly in the head-to-head ratings for the first time, was primed for battle. With every cable anchor staking out some specific acre of turf to call his or her own — Lou Dobbs on Mexicans with leaf-blowers, Nancy Grace on any blonde on any crime blotter anywhere in the world — Olbermann’s nightly, erudite-to-borderline verbose eviscerations of George W. and his leaking lifeboat of fools has paid off like Jed Clampett out shootin’ coons.
There is still great beauty contestant-like fun to be had watching Olbermann and Chris Matthews, whose ratings are not going north, interact for the camera. A DisneyWorld Jumbotron couldn’t contain both egos on the same screen. With Bush coming on at the top of the hour, Olbermann left the last eight minutes of his show for a collegial interview/chat with Matthews.
Matthews, who is psychologically incapable of letting anyone under the rank of Vice-President finish a sentence on his own show, has now completely dropped his tap-dancing on Bush’s war and is pretty full-throated about calling it a sick charade, designed solely to slide the denouement off on the next President and protect the Bush legacy. Matthews’ strength has always been his eye and ear for the grotesquely cynical machinations of DC power, so he knows a ham-fisted strategy when he sees it playing on a grand stage.
But Olbermann interviewing him and asking Matthews what he expected to hear from Bush was an invitation to a filibuster that even Olbermann had a hard time breaking. (I remain open to the possibility that Matthews’ position-taking on Iraq … easily four years late … is part of an overall MSNBC strategy to thoroughly exploit the vein Olbermann has opened. Joe Scarborough has been slid off to mornings, Tucker Carlson has been marginalized in Oprah-time and is regularly rumored to be getting the axe, and their boss, Dan Abrams, has pulled back from his customary kissy-face with administration spin-meisters. But what the hell. It’s show biz and everyone has to have a shtick. This new one — from the company that whacked Phil Donahue, after first ordering him to book two conservatives for every liberal — at least has the added value of making moral sense.)
Going in to Bush’s speech Olbermann was already playing with Bush’s “Return on Success” phrase as an eminently lampoonable piece of neo-Orwellianism, along the lines of, “Mission Accomplished.” Coming out it was Bush’s neuron-toasting assertion that 36 other countries were fighting alongside us in Iraq. Not even Nixon apologist Pat Buchanan, in MSNBC’s post-op panel, could handle that one, and Joe Biden, campaigning down in Council Bluffs was rendered as close to speechless as I’ve ever seen the man … and that kids, is really saying something.
By the way, Joe Biden may be the next Terry Bradshaw or Tiki Barber. He’s had good career in the Senate. He’s never going to be elected President, and his best act might be his third, as a regular commentator on a cable channel. He knows the game. He knows the players. He’s not afriad to say something outrageous from time to time and he’s not ashamed to get emotional — like tonight, when he wonders aloud what in the hell Bush is talking about. Biden was good stuff.
There was a precedent-setting moment in the post-speech hash, when John Edwards popped up in a two-minute commercial staking out his position as THE cut-off the money NOW candidate among the Democrats. Olbermann wondered afterward why Edwards bought time since MSNBC, generally respectful ground for Democrats, certainly on Olbermann’s show, would have probably had him on. The obvious answer of course was that by buying two minutes Edwards could answer his own questions, not Olbermann’s, or, God help him, Matthews’, and thereby say exactly what he wanted to say.
Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, on the panel with Buchanan and Rachel Maddow, an Olbermann favorite from Air America, predicted a carnival of candidate contortions in Iowa this weekend at former Sen. Tom Harkin’s bash with every Democrat trying to out-do each other as the leading “out now” candidate. Here, is an interesting piece Fineman wrote a couple years ago about the demise of “the main stream media party”.
Tim Russert and Brian Williams mailed in a couple clubby observations from their recent luncheon with Bush, with Williams appearing to violate the luncheon’s off-record agreement by hinting that Bush had said something about maintaining bases in Iraq for years to come.
My curiosity, looking toward tomorrow morning, and the rest of the mainstream media, including our local press, is who among them is courageous enough NOT to play the “balance game” and be as indignant as the MSNBC cast was?
I know. “Oh, goodness. Such temerity! Wonder aloud what in the hell the President of the United States is saying about 36 allies and and ‘enduring presence’. Heavens! What if we got an e-mail from those Powerline guys?”
Even Buchanan could only credit Bush with “solidifying his base” enough to hold his veto-proof minority and slide this mess off whoever comes next, to which Matthews, looking pained, responded, “but that’s a political decision”, not a strategy for the military or the country.
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