NBC News political director Chuck Todd, who is pretty much cool with torture but expressed righteous anger over the substantively laughable IRS non-scandal, appeared as a guest on Andrea Mitchell's ridiculous MSNBC show on Monday afternoon. The two consummate Villagers provided us with their unique and valuable insight on the political comebacks of former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and former U.S. congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner is running for Mayor of New York City and Spitzer has just announced his intention to run for New York City Comptroller.
Mitchell starts by asking, contemptuously, "What's going on in New York City?"
Well, Mrs. Greenspan, what's "going on in New York City" is this: two citizens, both with considerable public support, have decided to run for political office. What will happen now is there will be what are called "campaigns" and then "elections" and Weiner and Spitzer will either win or they will lose. Yes, I know, MANHATTAN HAS GONE MAD!
Here goes Todd, as eloquent as ever :
God bless Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno and our friend who's filling in for Jon Stewart, Jon Oliver, that's all easy to mock and all this stuff but it really is... when we look at this problem of trusting government... if I were an elected official who didn't take a picture of his private parts, who didn't use prostitutes, I would be sort of upset that these guys are demeaning the whole thing. Let's not leave out Sanford and Vitter. When you have lost the public trust for the way that you have acted, the idea that the only way back for you and your own therapy is to use the voters, you just sort of wish that some of these guys would, ya know, go do your own charity, go do it another way. Don't use the political office because it really just erodes all of the trust in politicians and government. It just adds to what's already a bad soup.
Mitchell responded that that's "demeaning soup." She's so clever.
Please read what Todd said very carefully because it is incredibly revealing. Just take a moment to consider the context here, and the demonstrated moral compasses of these two mindless creatures of the Beltway media establishment. Chuck Todd, once again, went on national television and dismissed calls to investigate Bush's torturers as "cable catnip" that would just get in the way of other, more important political matters. Andrea Mitchell is married to someone who Matt Taibbi
rightly calls "The Biggest Asshole in the Universe" - the guy who turned the Federal Reserve into "a permanent bailout mechanism for the super-rich." Just last week, Mitchell "
interviewed" former secretary of state Madeleine Albright - a psychopath who
explicitly supported the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children - with a tone so reverential it would embarrass the fucking Queen of England. So, torture, destroying the economy, and genocide are not enough to make Chuck or Andrea even raise an eyebrow. But sexting and hiring an escort are so profoundly offensive to their sensibilities that the perpetrators of these atrocities should voluntarily banish themselves from politics forever.
Please note, also, the absolute idiocy and disdain for democracy that are at work here. Tell me if you have ever come across a more intellectually incoherent sentence than this:
When you have lost the public trust for the way that you have acted, the idea that the only way back for you and your own therapy is to use the voters, you just sort of wish that some of these guys would ya know, go do your own charity, go do it another way.
Yeah, if you've totally lost the public, if the public just HATES you, then how dare you think you can re-enter politics just because you happen to get support from . . . the public! Seriously, can anyone make sense of this? If "the public" doesn't trust these people, then presumably they won't vote for them, which means Spitzer and Weiner won't be back in office, which means that everything Todd is upset about is moot. And what the hell does "using the voters" mean?
Rarely is sheer hatred for democracy expressed in such clear terms. What if, say, voters of New York City - you know, the actual human beings who live there and pay taxes there - want Weiner to be mayor and Spitzer to be comptroller and elect them? Will Charles Todd, a rich celebrity who doesn't even live in the goddamn city, be disappointed in the peasants for electing such moral deviants? Could he possibly walk the streets of New York and tell this to voters' faces?
The main point here, though, is the expression of the moral priorities and political values of two leading members of the Village press. Sex scandals are evidently viewed by these "journalists" as more monstrous offenses than war crimes. Starving a few hundred thousand children can't compare to the horror unleashed upon the world by that one NSFW pic Weiner sent!
Liz Cheney is considering
running for a U.S. Senate seat in Wyoming. I wonder if Todd and Mitchell will be getting together to declare
her morally unfit to run for political office, too? Yeah, she's supported torture and war crimes, but it just might take a Liz Cheney sex scandal.
And I'll leave you with that thought . . .
{Originally posted at
Crimethink}