Watching MSNBC is not an experience I would recommend to any conservative whose mind isn’t fire-hardened against liberal nonsense. Only those who’ve long since passed the point of “epistemic closure” could withstand hour after hour of this stuff without either (a) permitting themselves to be convinced that Jon Huntsman is a plausible Republican presidential candidate, or (b) erupting in a violent fit and throwing things at the TV.
However, for those of us capable of withstanding the impulse to either extreme reaction, spending the day with MSNBC is a fascinating glimpse into the worldview of the deluded. On Morning Joe today, I heard Mika Brzezinski wishing that “these clowns” — i.e., six of the eight main GOP candidates — would “go away” so that the Republican campaign could be boiled down to a contest between Mitt Romney and . . . Jon Huntsman.
Huntsman’s status as the Official MSNBC Republican Presidential Candidate is a message so relentlessly telegraphed by the network that it becomes self-defeating: If liberals want to influence the GOP campaign, they shouldn’t be so damned obvious about their preferences. It’s as if they think conservative voters are too stupid to figure out that there must be something drastically wrong with any Republican praised by Mika Brzezinski.
During today’s noontime NOW With Alex Wagner show — a newly launched replacement for the departed Contessa Brewer — Huntsman’s daughters got their own segment, fielding softball questions from the hostess. This is the kind of flattering human-interest coverage no serious conservative contender for the Republican nomination will ever get from MSNBC, and is therefore yet another clear signal that Huntsman is a liberal Trojan Horse smuggled into the GOP race for nefarious purposes.
Before the Huntsman fluff segment, however, Wagner hosted a panel discussion — referenced in my Tweet above — featuring Chris Hayes and Ari Melber of the Nation, Maggie Haberman of Politico and S.E. Cupp of the NY Daily News. Cupp was outnumbered 3-to-1 by the liberals on the panel, and if you count the host Wagner (a former HuffPoster), it was 4-to-1. And the first topic under discussion was Occupy Wall Street, which had declared its nationwide “Day of Action” today:
WAGNER: What are the ramifications of the protests today?
HAYES: Well, I think this week is sort of an ‘Empire Strikes Back’ moment for Occupy Wall Street in which, you know, there was this period in which there was a little bit of a honeymoon, I think both in the public imagination — the message really does resound, people really like ’99 percent’ — but it was inevitable that it would become a polarizing force, and we’ve seen its approval rating start to decline. That was absolutely going to happen. In fact, every effective social movement is a polarizing force at a certain level. The question is, what is next after the sort of base of the encampment is taken away? I think today is a sort of opportunity to sort of galvanize and everybody to sort of organically brainstorm what happens next. So I think today is pretty important.
WAGNER: So it’s a brainstorm to cross the Brooklyn Bridge?
HAYES: Something like that. Yeah, exactly.
CUPP: And the subway stations around the city.
HABERMAN: I mean, part of the problem with Occupy Wall Street — I agree with everything Chris said, although I do think, in terms of defining this as a social movement, that’s been a little complicated. People have not agreed on whether this is a social movement, because there hasn’t been a group — you know, a unifying precept that everyone agrees on nationally, when you’re seeing all these different movements. So I think this is a difficult moment, because I think you did see Mayor Bloomberg come out and do what people have been urging him to do for a while in the business community, which was get rid of the encampment, and now I’m not really sure that the second act will be as effective.
HAYES: I just want to say one more thing, which is that I think that the thing that makes it polarizing, which is the disruption of everyday life, which can be inconvenient and a real pain if you’re trying to get on a train, they’re occupying it —
CUPP: And the cultural divide, too, the idea that this is like a white liberal arts movement I think is off-putting to some folks who are not in major cities —
HAYES: I think that’s true, although I also think — I’ve been struck by how multiracial the coalition is down there, and the people in the streets. And I think that the disruption is necessary for what they’re trying to achieve which — the fundamental core precept here is that normalcy is not OK.
CUPP: Anarchy, violence, sexual assault —
HAYES: No. Oh, come on —
CUPP: One public-relations nightmare after another —
HAYES: That’s preposterous!
CUPP: — that’s necessary to get —
HAYES: What are the incidents of sexual assault?
CUPP: Are you kidding? Go down to Zuccotti Park — you can’t anymore, because they were kicked out — but go down —
HAYES: There are thousands of people across the country — thousands of people across the county —
CUPP: So, percentage-wise, it’s OK? It’s acceptable. I mean, that’s crazy. This is a group that has suffered one public-relations nightmare after another. And that’s fine. I recently wrote a column comparing Tea Party to Occupy. They’re mass movements. They share a lot of commonalities and —
MELBER: Here’s the thing, S.E., you’re talking —
CUPP: And one group is just like another, but this is a moment when this group has to be taken seriously if they’re going to survive.
WAGNER: Ari, keep — go ahead.
MELBER: You’re talking about P.R., you’re talking about whether it’s a movement or not. I think Occupy Wall Street has been very successful in the fact that it is not about P.R. It is not about professionalized politics. We in the media, we in politics, have gotten so accustomed to everything being a bumper sticker, sound-bite, press release and —
CUPP: Well, I’m sorry. Violence and sexual assault is not good for —
MELBER: I’m not going to go down that road. As you know, everybody on this panel is against sexual assault and obviously, as with any park, you have to have police and no one, I think, is saying otherwise. But what they have done is organize people around gathering and having teach-ins and having a discussion about the power of Wall Street. . . .
OK, that’s enough transcribing for one day. Bad enough to have to watch MSNBC without having to relive it by transcribing the audio. But you get the idea: Liberals decided from the outset that Occupy Wall Street would be a rallying point, their triumphant response to the Tea Party movement, and they refuse to let it go. It must be defended.
Now that the Left’s movement has disintegrated into what Cupp calls a “public-relations nightmare” — violence, crime, disease, an irresistible scum-magnet for every pervert, schizo and anarchist looking for a deviant thrill — the MSNBC crowd continues stubbornly insisting that this frothing degenerate mob is a broad-based “social movement,” and that everything offensive about it can be dismissed as irrelevant or trivial, in comparison to the movement’s goals, whatever the goals actually are.
It’s like the old joke about going to a fight and a hockey game broke out: Occupy Wall Street had a “teach-ins” and a riot broke out. Or was it vice-versa? Never mind. My point is this: In the cloud-cuckooland illogic of MSNBC, all that matters are the movement’s allegedly noble intentions and not the criminal consequences which we are urged to ignore.
This isn’t the “reality-based community” but rather, to borrow a phrase from Ace of Spades, community-based reality — groupthink, where certain beliefs and attitudes are credentials required for membership in the ideological club. Liberals who accuse the Right of “epistemic closure” are perfectly capable of creating their own alternative universe where the truth is whatever they say it is, and whatever they say it is just happens to be the message most advantageous to the Democratic Party.
MSNBC propagates this Bizarro World mythos every day, and when a token conservative like S.E. Cupp is invited on to represent the demonized Other, she must be interrupted and shouted down and given self-righteous lectures by her moral superiors. They get to speak in paragraphs, while she can scarcely be permitted to complete a sentence.
An interesting contrast among the panelists is apparent when we examine the biography of Ari Melber:
During the 2008 general election, Melber traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the U.S. Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. Melber received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy.
Which is to say, Melber’s background is as a Democratic Party operative, by contrast to the biography of S.E. Cupp:
S.E. is a political columnist and culture critic. She has a regular online column at the New York Daily News, and a regular feature at The Daily Caller. She is a contributing editor at Townhall magazine, and a regular contributor to Politico’s “Arena.” She has been published in the Washington Post, Newsmax, Slate, Human Events, American Spectator, Townhall, FOXNews.com, Sports Illustrated online, Maxim online, NASCAR.com, FrontPage, Detroit Free Press and others.
S.E. is a political commentator. She has appeared on FOXNews, MSNBC, CNN, CSPAN, Al Harra and others. She is a regular guest on “Hannity,” “Larry King Live,” “Fox & Friends,” “Geraldo,” and “Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld.” She has been heard on dozens of radio shows, including The Dennis Miller Show, The Mancow Show, The Curtis Sliwa Show, Bubba the Love Sponge, Andrew Wilkow, The Alan Colmes Show and others.
She is a graduate of Cornell University (2000) and a Masters candidate at NYU (2010). She was born in Carlsbad, CA and grew up primarily in Andover, MA. She lives in New York City.
Cupp is a writer/commentator who has chosen politics as her subject matter, whereas Melber is a political operative whose journalism is a function of his partisan commitments. This is an interesting imbalance and, while I suppose there is a certain randomness to the combination of panel guests, I think the contrast between Melber and Cupp’s biographies points up significant differences in how the rival pundtry brigades are staffed.
BTW, the “nerd glasses” motif with younger TV talking heads seems to me an attempt to convey seriousness, to deflect the instinctive reaction of older viewers: “Who are these kids jabbering about politics? What the hell do they know? Get off my lawn!”
Melber probably skipped the nerd glasses because he thinks he looks grown-up enough without them. But Melber graduated from the University of Michigan in 2002, which would make him about 30, whereas Cupp (B.A., Cornell, 2000) is 32, as is Hayes. By contrast to these juveniles, Haberman — a veteran reporter and daughter of a Pulitzer-winning journalist for the New York Times — is practically a geriatric at 38.
Maybe Haberman should have let Melber borrow her nerd glasses.
