Sunday Chat & Chews ay-yi-yi.
Remember when Jon Stewart rightly decried Crossfire (and helped get it cancelled)?
The patty-cakes playing acting had gotten old. Sadly, few notice the same thing about the Sunday Chat & Chews with their same topics, same guests, same pretense as presenting a wide ranging discussion from a wide range of views.
The Sonny & Cher of the Chat & Chews should have driven the lack of diversity home long ago. Sadly Meet the Press may not be able to trot out Mary Matalin and James Carville to sing "I Make You Bored" this sweeps month. Is Carville making nice with David Geffen and suing Mary Matalin for involuntary servitude? Sadly no.
Arianna Huffington gives us the lowdown in "Why the Dems Need James Carville to Take a Long, Long Vacation" (The Huffington Post; sent in by Cindy):
During a week when Harry Reid and the Dems finally found their spines and their voices on Plamegate and the war, it was deeply disturbing to see James Carville parading his tired, old, and utterly clueless act all over the TV -- supposedly offering up the Democratic point of view.
Can somebody please, please, please shut Carville up -- especially about Plamegate. His takes on the scandal are utterly compromised by his marriage to Mary Matalin.This isn't like the weird-but-fun old days when they were a sitcom come to life -- running opposing campaigns during the day and sharing pillow talk at night while creating a cottage industry as "the Donny and Marie of politics."That's all in the past. Now, as one of Dick Cheney's most trusted first-term advisors, one of eight founding members of the White House Iraq Group, a witness in front of the Plamegate grand jury, and a close friend of Scooter Libby ("The man you pray you get seated next to at a dinner party," she recently cooed), Matalin is a central player in all this.
[. . .]
I'll never forget sitting in Lawrence Bender's living room 12 days before the 2004 election, listening to Carville predict that the election was in the bag.
"If we can't win this damn election," he said, "with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55% of the country believing we're heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs -- if we can't win this one, then we can't win shit! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party."
But, instead of rethinking, the party is returning to the bone dry Carville advice well. He's one of the guiding forces behind the influential Democracy Corps, which recently released a report [PDF] calling for the Democrats to run on a 2006 agenda focused on "health care, education and energy, followed by top end tax cut repeal and homeland security." Thud (that's the sound of Democratic chances dropping). James Carville hasn't had a fresh idea since The War Room stopped filming. It's time for him to take a long, long vacation from the spotlight. And he should take his Cheney/Libby-apologist, WHIG-war-salesman-wife with him.
Wonder why the latter day Dylan attacks Arianna so? He can kiss and make up with the terminally useless and clueless David Broder (among others) but he has a real beef with Arianna (despite the claim of liking her more than most).
Arianna doesn't make nice about his friends Matalin and Carville.
Our latter day Dylan, so supposedly brave, so supposedly worried about the discourse and clowning has never taken on the ugly reality that is the Sonny & Cher Show appearing regularly on Meet the Press. What's it been? Eight years? All that time and never has he taken them to task for their useless dog & pony show or for making a mockery of real issues. Should an issue come up, something resembling an actual one, it's all about their own personalities in their responses. We're supposed to find it "cute" and "endearing."
God forbid we ever get anything to actually think about on the Chat & Chews.
Let's start with ABC's This Week. And let's start with the roundtable:
At the roundtable: Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the house; Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International; ABC News' Linda Douglass; and George Will join me to discuss Karl Rove's uncertain future at the White House, Judge Alito's reception on Capitol Hill, the senate confrontation over Iraq intelligence, and next Tuesday's gubernatorial races and special elections.
See the problem?
Karl Rove, Bully Boy's nominee, Iraq . . .
The "guests" include George Will. Will, Gingrich and Fareed (in pearls as a tribute to Cokie) all on the right. Linda Douglass will presumably playing the role of journalist in the midst of the right wing lion's den.
If you make it to that part, you've already seen ABC suck up to Bill Gates and heard from Chuck Hagel and Joe Biden.
Over at NBC's Meet the Press, Karl Rove's phone buddy Tubby Russert apparently heard that last Saturday Nina Totenberg wasted the public airwaves and tax payer monies plugging Rush Limbaugh ("I do listen!") and just knew Tote Bag was his type of gal which is why she's roundtabling again. Pledge drives can be iffy, the Tote Bag knows, but suck up to the right and you can coast through life. Joining her, fresh from his catfight with the Times Richard W. Stevenson over Scotty McClellan ("Paws off, Richie," Stretch snarled, "I saw him first!") is David Gregory. And the Crockett to Tubby's Tubbs, Ron Brownstein. The non-roundtable guests are Ted Kennedy and Tom Coburn.
Which brings us to Face. CBS's Face The Nation. Give them points for not having Thomas Friedman on. (Jan Crawford Greenburg is back.) That's all they get credit for. Three politicians as guests: Patty-cakes Roberts ("I always planned hearings on the adminstration's use of intel, I just wanted to let it marinate for twelve plus months!"), lone Democrat Dick Durbin and Old Hatchet face. Why is Orrin Hatch even on? Did he play golf with Bob last month?
Check your local listings for air times (all air Sunday). Hopefully you'll check in order to avoid them but if you're a brave (or misguided) soul, good luck to you.
Lastly, I'm out of town and tomorrow's schedule may lead to posts at intervals. Tags require . . .
Backing up. When an entry's done, I click on "publish." Then I have the option of clicking on "Republish index" or "Republish entire blog." "RI" takes no more than three minutes. I usually use multiple screens, hit "RI" after hitting "publish" and do the entires one after another. At the end of which I do "Republish entire . . ." which can take five to ten minutes (though it can take even longer).
The tags that Rebecca's asking us all to do change things. If I dodn't hit "Republish entire . . ." after an entry, it won't show up at Technocrati. I probably won't have time to post all the entries at once tomorrow morning as a result. So we'll have our Times entry (possibly two) and we'll have Ruth's Morning Edition Report as well as the thing on Laura Flanders. But it may not all go up at once. (It probably won't.)
So that's the heads up on that.
I wasn't planning on speaking this weekend. As a result of this last minute change in my personal schedule, we'll delay the entry re: Danny Schechter until Sunday. It will be done Sunday evening even if that means doing only one "roundup" post.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
arianna huffington
sunday chat and chews
sonny and cher
