Hullabaloo

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

 
MSNBC is becoming a font of brainless CW on week-days

by digby

Exhibit A, from today's Now with Alex Wagner:

Ed Rendell: I'm the co-chair of the campaign to fix the debt with Judd Gregg and we've got now 2,000 of the 5,000 major corporations signed on to the campaign we've raised 26 million dolars for a PR campaign right after the election to try to get peopel to focus. I think the American business community is going to weigh in with Republicans and say "enough, we want this done."

Alex Wagner: that would be a bold strike by the business community

[More stupid irrelevant cross talk about nothing ... see below]

Wagner: Luke, before we let you go, the president talks a lot about the fever breaking. I know you just gave us a sort of pessimistic view of the next couple months. But do you think the fever could break inside the Republican party come next year if in fact he is re-elected?

Luke Russert: well, it's a question we talked about a few days ago on your show which is if Mitt Romney loses, what is the catharsis within the Republican party? Do they become more conservative and say, "you know what we nominated a guy who was way to liberal, way too moderate" or do they say "we need to reform ourselves and not be so rigid." And that's honestly a question which I think is very hard to fathom which direction they'll go this far out ...

Rendell: Don't you think if the president's re-elected, he can frame the issue by saying I want to do Simpson-Bowles, some form of it, I want to do it now, let's all get in and do our jobs. Then the Republicans have a real Hobson's Choice..

Russert: If both sides agree to jump in the deep end holding hands. But you've seen, is there the impetus to get to that magic number 217 votes in the House, it's hard to say...

Rendell: if the president and the Democrats are on board, and the Republicans say no

Russert: If they're on board in terms of raising the Medicare age

Rendell: uh huh, uh huh

Russert: possibly, possibly. Then you could say the Republicans will be out in the woods for the 2014 midterms. It's tough, it's tough. We all thought this would happen in the summer of 2011 and you saw that that deal died. Mr Woodward wrote a whole book about it.

Wagner: Some questions are even too difficult for the sage of Capitol Hill...

Indeed. But in this case, one can only hope that his read is correct and the surer bet is that House Republicans are is insane as ever and that there are enough sane Democrats to stop this hideous thing. Simpson-Bowles in all its "forms" has got to be thrown on the ash heap, period. Nothing could be worse for the economy or for the future of this country.

The most important piece of this conversation actually came before that excerpt above and it came from New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren who said this:

Lindgren: What's interesting is that there is still no real pressure on the political establishment by the bond market.I mean there's still not. And until there is, that's what's forcing things in Europe. Yields went crazy. And there's not that. The US treasury bond is the last safe haven in the world. And there's no real market crisis yet for US debt so...

One would think that would be an interesting point and that people on this panel would wonder why and consider if that fact might be meaningful in all this. But no. Instead, John Heilman started ribbing Lindgren, saying he sounded like he was a trader on the desk at Goldman Sachs and sounding like Alan Greenspan instead of a journalist. (Not kidding.) And the whole panel laughed and laughed. And then he did it again in the stupid crosstalk I referenced above, making some silly remark about Lindgren wearing a tie.

Apparently, it's a big mistake to talk about what's actually happening in the economy and the markets when you're discussing the important topic of slashing the shit out of important government programs.

Nothing to see here, folks, move along ...


*I'll put up the video when it becomes available.


.
digby 9/12/2012 11:00:00 AM