Ain’t no secret, I’ve always liked Ari Melber. I liked him on the Cycle, and I thought he did a yeoman’s work in taking over to cover for Lawrence O’Donnell when he suffered that auto accident a few years ago. He’s good at it, he’s personable, flashes an occasional sardonic sense of humor, and while a trained lawyer, he appears on many of MSNBC’s shows simply because he has a natural talent for taking legal issues and breaking them down without making the viewer feel like a moron.
What a contrast with Greta van Susteren in the 6:00 EDT time slot. The first time I saw Greta, she was one of the ever present legal talking heads on CNN’s 24/7/365 “Trial of the Century” coverage of OJ’s first little legal tussle. Even back then she didn’t seem to have any real flare for the journalistic part of it, in fact, to my memory, she spent most of the time taking a contrarian position to events just to piss everybody else off. A perfect fit for Cluster Fox.
I suffered the Greta fool festival solely for the reason that breaking Trump news had a funny habit of exploding during her hour. And one of the greatest crosses I had to bear, other than her own smarmy, know-it-all attitude was her insistence on having that intolerable legal fossil, Alan Dershowitz on her show, even if the only legal issue was old Perry Mason reruns. Apparently, Greta is a former law school student of Dershowitz’s, and it was apparent with his every, all too frequent appearance that she still had a crush on her old teach.
Apparently Ari Melber does not suffer from the same infatuation. On Friday, Dershowitz made it obvious that he shouldn’t even be in court defending people on traffic tickets by stating that Special Counsel Robert Mueller only impaneled a grand jury in Washington because Trump only got 4% of the vote there. He basically accused Mueller of grand jury shopping to assure himself a cupcake jury. Forget the fact that, as the congresswoman from DC pointed out next, the entire Baltimore-DC-Alexandria corridor went overwhelmingly for Hillary. Other legal experts have also pointed out that grand juries are impaneled in the geographical location of the suspected crimes, so that if there is a trial, it is by a jury of “peers”. But Dershowitz is insistent, Mueller is cherry picking locations to make sure he nails Trump in what wold basically be a kangaroo court. And on Monday, the dumbass wrote an op-ed piece that doubled down on this scurrilous assertion.
So, Ari had Dershowitz on The Beat yesterday to talk it over. He gave the pompous old coot all the time he wanted for his 6:00 shit fountain show, and then the wheels fell off the bus for Dershowitz. Are started asking legal questions, but nor technical legal questions in language nobody could understand, he went full Melber and used English. Dershowitz was plainly pissed off at being interrogated by this pipsqueak upstart, especially when he realized that the way Ari phrased the questions, it made Dershowitz sound like he was wearing a tin foil hat. Dershowitz became defensive and arrogant, using superiority statements like”Any honest defense attorney or prosecutor will admit”, but Melber had him by the balls, and knew it. At one point, Dershowitz sarcastically shot back an answer which was pure supposition on Melber’s intent, and Ari responded something like; “Thanks for reading my mind to tell everybody what I meant by asking a simple question”. The beatdown was so complete that Dershowitz was finally left wrapping his dignity around his shoulders like a tattered old shawl by accusing Ari of impugning his character and motives in his statements as being possibly motivated by an interest in being involved in a possible case for the defense.
Watch it for yourself. The segment is only about 8 minutes long, but if you like seeing what a real lawyer looks like in action, and especially if you despise Alan Dershowitz as much as I do, this will make your day. It made mine yesterday.