The Spice Must Flow
As regular readers and all good Scissoheads know, the Sunday Talkies are a bust. They stopped being news programs long ago and became something of an inside the beltway brunch party. The guests are regularly spokespeople from the Republican Party or a center-right think tank who presents prepared remarks with remarkably little pushback, usually just to clarify whatever focus-group tested message that the politicos want to send.
The Powerhouse Panels are all low-watt insiders, stroking their chins and spouting off conventional wisdom reactions to what they heard at the cocktail parties the night before, either in agreement (usually) or disagreement (rarely, unless the guest is at all Lefty). The rest of the panel nods in agreement and then they stroke their chins and pontificate some more.
We bring this up only because the conservative-owned Tiger Beat on the Potomac (thanks Charlie) email thingie raises something positively Leftist: our failed political press ™ has already moved on from the Insurrection and are treating Hair Füror like a legitimate candidate and the coverage is already essentially The Horse Race:
Much of this morning’s coverage of the events is mocking in tone. But two years after the attack on the Capitol, a few months after Trump helped lead Republicans to an historically disappointing midterm election, and amid several investigations at the state and federal level that could lead to criminal charges against him — and the rise of at least a dozen potential serious challengers — Trump remains the most likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
This WaPo piece by Dan Balz captures what we mean: “Trump’s path to GOP nomination is strewn with obstacles,” says the headline. “Still, a wide field could so divide the race that Trump could take the nomination, as he did in 2016, by winning a plurality of primary voters.”
There is a very déjà vu quality to the reporting. There are a million reasons that Trump shouldn’t still be standing and that his party should reject him and move on and find a new nominee for 2024. But he has a good chance of winning anyway if he can just clear a few hurdles in the primaries.
And the media will let him. If you look at the coverage of Hair Füror’s two campaign events this weekend, none mentioned the insurrection nor the role the 2X impeached LOSER played in it, not even to contextualize the Big Lie he was lobbing again. Nothing. Nada. Crickets.
It’s 2016 all over again. Our Failed Political Press ™ has learned NOTHING.
Mock Paper Scissors 
This old chestnut will reverberate forever:
‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ — Upton Sinclair
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The Sunday talk shows are how they get boomers like my parents. They’re far too liberal to fall for Fox news, too liberal even to vote for conservatives. That’s not the point. The point is just to convince them that, sure, some Republicans might take the rhetoric too far, but there is still a reasonable and responsible philosophy of government had the heart of the movement. It doesn’t get their vote, but it makes them much less worried about it when Republicans take office, and more likely to call Lefties on the internet out-of-touch radicals.
Luckily my parents finally figured this out a couple of years ago, but it was much harder than it should have been to convince them that Trump is what he is, and the Republican party is what it is, because their primary contact with those movements was laundered through the Sunday talkies.
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Your parents? Kids those days! [I was born in the last year of the ’30’s, 1940].
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But they all wear suits and ties and speak with authority…
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I remember when ABC had their Powerhouse Panel sit in short-backed acrylic chairs, and everyone looked slumped and awful except for Peggington, and then it dawned on me: these were barstools.
Rgds,
TG
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