Tag / Mika Brzezinski

by Edward Champion

Fuck Chuck Todd

Chuck Todd is an incompetent and irresponsible menace, a preening peacock floating on his own arrogance and stupidity. He is unfit to practice journalism and should not be hosting Meet the Press or any other television news show.

I’ve seen a lot of detestable news anchors in my time. I have watched actual adults who claim to uphold the Fourth Estate deracinate their journalistic credibility the minute that they get their own show, failing to push back against the powers that be who steer their “news” programs into crass shouting matches, relentless ego-stroking, and the infernal trap of touchy-feely relatable celebrity. These deplorable and obscenely paid pundits, who we entrust to relay the events of our day and to challenge anyone who answers a question with flagrant lies and willful equivocation, have conducted interviews with their schnozzes smothered in dun and their hubris puffed up by multiyear contracts. They never tender the vital critical inquiries at the right time and often contribute to a dangerous political landscape because they have nothing to lose. Before Trump was even a reality and the Morning Joe train wreck was roundly ridiculed by any self-respecting media follower, I observed Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski whip themselves into a lather over the Koch Brothers, with Scarborough actually stating that these two dangerous billionaires who have systematically funded anti-union egotists like Scott Walker and out-of-touch zombies like Mitt Romney were “like, I think, most Americans.” Now Scarborough prostrates himself before the social media crowd as a penitent turncoat. And ten thousand people retweet him, even though Scarborough himself declared Trump a “centrist Democrat” three years ago and would undoubtedly alter his malleable ideology if it meant bigger ratings. I’ve met used car salesmen who I would trust more than Joe Scarborough.

But there’s actually someone much worse than all of these chickenheads.

Chuck Todd has no redeeming qualities as a human being. He has the mien and manner of a mangy dog who wants you to applaud as he’s playing with his balls, seemingly incapable of comprehending the vulgarity of the masturbatory act. He possesses nothing in the way of grace or humility and behaves on television with all the undeserved pomp and preen of a teenage pop star who can’t hold a tune but is inexplicably beloved by millions. His eyes dart around for attention and amusement. That ridiculous goatee doesn’t disguise the fact that he’s a grown up version of the snotty kid who throws a fit every time he stands in line at the supermarket. You get the sense that Todd would pop open the champagne if a cheap quip landed while thousands were mowed down by machine guns in the streets. He is an unctuous apologist for fascism and a gleeful normalizer of governmental malfeasance and human rights abuses. He is a dangerous dipstick who needs to be fired immediately and banned from and booed out of every newsroom. The combination of arrogance and stupidity is already problematic enough in the White House. Must we endure it on the national news as well?

How far have we fallen? Well, Tim Russert, a previous host of Meet the Press, was not only a highly accomplished interlocutor, but a man who went to law school and who served as chief of staff to Senator Daniel Moynihan. Todd, like many mediocre white men, went to George Washington University for a few years, dropped out, served as an office runner depositing checks for Tom Harkin’s campaign before inexplicably falling upward into the editor-in-chief position at the National Journal, ping-ponging his way over to NBC and into his present position of America’s #1 bullshit merchant.

The great joy I would take in seeing Chuck Todd thoroughly destroyed, the good money I would pay to see Chuck Todd pied in the face every day for the rest of his natural life, significantly outweighs my animosity towards the FOX News people, who are easily recognized as vile creatures who are propping up a far-right government with shameful propaganda and corrupting the minds of Americans. Todd, on the other hand, presents himself as the “sensible” pundit and thus the “reasonable” guy when he’s really just sugarcoating clear evils that the media must not take lightly.

Back in June, Todd earned rightful fury when he attempted to ding Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after she correctly pointed out that America was running concentration camps on its southern border. Todd, with a twisted sociopathic rapid-fire glee that reveled more in being “right” rather than possessing any empathy or compassion for the lives of undocumented immigrants now suffering and even dying in these detention centers, replied, “Fair enough. But Congresswoman, tens of thousands were also brutalized, tortured, starved, and ultimately died in….concentration camps. Camps like Dachau. If you want to criticize the shameful treatment at our southern border, fine. You’ll have plenty of company. But be careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps.” Ocasio-Cortez never said “Nazi concentration camps.” She said “concentration camps.” By every known definition of the word, concentration camps are precisely what is now happening in America — in that undocumented immigrants of a minority group are being held, mistreated, and suffering in a facility with armed guards. Todd, not unlike a white supremacist, not only glosses over the number of deaths in Auschwitz, Dachau, Belzec, et al. (believed to be around six million, not merely “tens of thousnads”). He conveniently discounts the disgraceful Japanese internment camps that flourished in America during World War II, where approximately 120,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes thanks to Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. America also erected concentration camps in the Philippines just before the Spanish-American War.

Todd willfully spread misinformation about what concentration camps are, deliberately elided America’s past abuses, and significantly deflated the numbers and the severity of concentration camps throughout human history. He did all this, presumably because he wishes to mimic the strutting peacock of the network where he is now employed.

Chuck Todd, the irredeemable hack and superficial carnival barker, showed his true colors again when he viewed today’s Robert Mueller hearings purely through the haze of “optics” rather than substance. This ridiculous concern for aesthetics rather than substance and due process was swiftly rebuked by Columbia Journalism Review‘s Maria Bustillos, who pointed out that this fit into a pattern in which Todd is more interested in the “entertainment” of political coverage rather than the substance. She dug up a chart pointing out that Todd talked more than all but three of the presidential candidates in the last Democratic debate (and this when Todd had only been partially on stage).

When Meet the Press started on the Mutual radio network back in 1945, it was designed to promote The American Mercury — the same magazine for which the firebrand H.L. Mencken wrote for. Interestingly enough, the first host of Meet the Press — in its radio and television versions — wasn’t an arrogant jackass, but a thoughtful woman named Martha Rountree, who also created the show. It was Rountree’s express mission to ask difficult and provocative questions of major political figures in unrehearsed interviews. “There is nothing so refreshing as unadorned conviction,” said Rountree in a 1946 interview.

There hasn’t been a woman hosting Meet the Press on a regular basis since. I think it’s now time for a woman to take over the reins and steer the show away from its presently unpardonable adornments under Chuck Todd, whose recent interview with Trump is arguably the most embarrassing conversation in the show’s history. Todd let Trump get away with blatant falsehoods and gaslighting. He did not have the conviction or the skills to push back.

Chuck Todd’s gaffes, timidity, and anti-intellectualism can no longer be tolerated. He needs to be fired immediately. Maybe he’ll have a better career managing a nice restaurant, if only because the Yelp reviewers will hold him more accountable for being such a spineless and pusillanimous asshole than NBC ever will.

by Edward Champion

Donald Trump is a Filthy Animal Who Must Be Impeached

Donald Trump is too dangerous and too boorish to serve as President of the United States. He must be impeached immediately.

It is now impossible to ignore the facts. We live with a corrupt and incompetent and highly dangerous monster who is causing great and unfathomable harm to this country, a dark Lovecraftian creature who has not made this country “great again,” but who has, in fact, made us the laughing stock of the world. This is a rapacious tyrant who openly ridicules the weak and the infirm, sustaining a callous and anti-intellectual streak that not even Richard Hofstadter could have foreseen originating within the Executive Branch. Only 39% of Americans approve of keeping this traitorous train wreck of a leader in office, and one ponders exactly what sterling qualities this minority sees within such a walking piece of offal. Is there some virtue in believing in a bedraggled oaf who cannot sustain a single thought for longer than twenty seconds? Or who cannot read any vital memo longer than a page? Or who openly invites white supremacists and hatemongers into his Cabinet?

But for most Americans, Donald Trump remains the rightly despised cancer, a disgusting fecal morsel that you can never seem to flush down the toilet, a tenth-rate Napoleon who openly resists any reasonable probing into his wanton business dealings and his possible collusion with Russia. He is an illiterate and indolent tax dodger incapable of exercising his mind or his body, yet he amazingly wants you to osculate his liver-spotted and hateful backside. He is surely one of the most oversensitive and graceless world leaders in human history. And now with his repulsively misogynist tweets to Mika Brzezinski, it is safe to say that Donald Trump is an unhinged megalomaniac incapable of practicing the basic duties of dignity that the office requires and who must now be taken out by impeachment. If our two houses lack the courage or the effrontery to do this, then we must lead a campaign to replace any Senator or Representative standing in the way of preserving American’s future in next year’s midterm elections.

This disheveled animal has proven himself unfit to be called President of the United States, much less President of the Alfalfa Club or the self-appointed bipolar king of a psychiatric ward, with his lack of discretion with state secrets, his disastrous meetings with other world leaders, and his openly racist travel ban on innocent Americans. This repulsive beast is not a man, but a mentally unbalanced rapist whose true hues blind the public whenever he is even vaguely challenged. He is a savage and abhorrent mongrel who has caused reading the headlines to become an act of embracing shellshock and chronic fatigue. He is a bully whose pathetic cries for attention, which range from the fake Time Magazine covers that have adorned his clubs and his chronic insistence for sycophantic obeisance, must now be pissed on, ridiculed, openly mocked, and resisted with every principled fiber that this country still has left. The inevitable demise of this feral manboy, who sustains a remarkable vulgarity at seventy-one years that outshines even someone suffering with Tourette’s syndrome, will surely be cause to pop open the champagne. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to attend Trump’s ineluctable funeral just to kick Trump’s mangy and bloated corpse further into the dirt to ensure that the evil bastard is indeed dead and that he will not harm the country for another second.

So what do we do to stop him? It begins with the amoral Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO who is surely one of the most spineless profiteers in recent American history and the man who created this mess by failing to curtail this despicable demagogue’s rise through trolling and harassment during last year’s election, displaying some stones for once in his sad, passive, hell-ravaging life. Dorsey must perform his patriotic duty by suspending Our Fearless Leader’s account for regularly violating Twitter’s policy against harassment and abuse. Dorsey banned the hateful Milo Yiannopoulos and has suspended many alt-right accounts. Since presidential precedent has been so thoroughly eroded, this is a reasonable measure.

It continues with Republicans uniting with Democrats to reject this faux statesman’s stature, as Senators Lindsey Graham and Ben Sasse did this morning, by demanding the largest binpartisan investigation imaginable, one that rivals Watergate and Iran-Contra in scope, given the many unanswered questions and Trump’s increasingly secretive affairs. If Republicans can vehemently demonstrate with their actions that they understand Trump is an aberration and potentially a bigger fraud than Rutherford Hayes was in the disputed 1876 election or even the hanging chads when Bush represented the comparatively saner interloper, then we might see some small restoration of representative democracy. All one needs to do is to regularly call their offices and remind these legislators that they will inevitably have to run for re-election, and to not stop doing this. This must be accompanied by active and regular protest.

But most importantly, America must stop calling Donald Trump its President of the United States until he has earned the right to that title. Thus far, Trump’s greatest achievement has involved uniting an increasing majority of Americans against him. He has accomplished nothing especially remarkable in policy or achievement, save the hard-won confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as Supreme Court Justice, our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord, and a series of internal firings that has rivaled Nixon in speed and scope. He has intimidated FBI directors, besmirched London’s first Muslim mayor, shared classified information where he should not have, demonstrated an inability to perform basic arithmetic in his proposed budget, and used Twitter to destroy our alliances. This is a man who neither comprehends nor cares for the way politics operates. Trump has had six months to establish a doctrine, but it essentially involves throwing a random dart into the Seven Circles of Hell and seeing what lands.

When a pestilent rodent invades your property, you don’t let it scuttle around for eternity. The time has come to call the exterminator on Donald Trump. This man is incompetent. He must not be respected. He must be resisted. He must be acknowledged as poisonous vermin eating the walls of this democratic republic. He must be impeached by any means necessary.