Sunday Morning Blogging, Pt. 1: Meet the Press, 9/20/09

OK, I haven't sat down to watch the Sunday morning political chat shows in a little while. There's a reason for that: they were starting to piss me off. Bouncing around from the political faux outrage of the previous Monday to the forced apology of late Saturday, the shows have largely become Politics Soup, only with actual elected officials. Then, most of the shows get together a bizarre collection of--usually, also bizarre looking--talking heads to cackle like chickens for the rest of the show.

What? You mean they've always been like that? Oh. Well, maybe it's just ceasing to interest me. Anyway, my first dose of this soup today is Meet the Press with David Gregory, a decidedly less relevant show since host Tim Russert died. President Obama was the first guest, and I was fairly impressed, though he only talked for 15 minutes. He's a little too slick, but he's also well spoken, and did not raise my embarrassment shield the way George W. Bush did every damned time he was on the tee-vee.

Gregory decided to rebut the President with two of the most powerful current Republicans, and that is a sad state of affairs for the GOP. Twitchy, orange John Boner Boehner and whiny, frowny, fey Lindsey Graham are two of the three best the GOP has to offer (the third being constipated turtle, Mitch McConnell who did not appear). These easily lampooned figures did their best to talk down Obama while trying to put an eensy bit of distance between themselves and the lunatic fringe overtaking their party like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The charisma-free twosome regurgitated the conservative lines of the week, including a "reset button" for health care reform, which isn't even under consideration. Probably no one was swayed by Obama, and definitely no one was swayed by Boehner and Graham.

The two-man "round table" included Eugene Robinson, a pundit I have a lot of respect for, and Roger Simon, a pundit I've never heard of. Robinson displays more intelligence, insight and humor than the host himself, and Simon left no impression on me at all. Discussions of "race" brought up because of Jimmy Carter's notion of racism inspiring Obama's opposition, didn't go beyond the controversy. That is where Gregory falls down, and Russert would have done better. There is a strong case to be made for racism behind the birthers, deathers, tenthers, tea baggers et. al. And Jimmy Carter saying so isn't itself the controversy. Calling out racist behavior has become the issue, rather than the behavior itself.

There is still something rather civilized about MTP that works on one hand, and doesn't on the other. For the most part, the program doesn't lend itself to boisterous arguments and cross-talk. That is welcome on a Sunday morning. But it also lends itself to a he said/he said dynamic, in which no minds are changed. OK, that's it for MTP. . . on to the next one.