Friday, October 31, 2014

Why Republicans Always Get Away With It, MSNBC Edition

Our current political media's largest failure has been their well-practiced ability to not only excuse Republicans' bad behavior, but to conveniently forget about it, too. This is why we have midterms where everyone is shrugging and exclaiming that they've never seen an election like this where everything is so...tied.

Here's why that happens. Chris Christie goes out and bullies a constituent, making the fatuous claim that Christie, and Christie alone, was taking care of Sandy victims after the cameras left, unlike that rude man with the sign who just wants to heckle him.

We now know from Chris Hayes that the gentleman holding the sign took a month off work without pay to go and help with the Sandy cleanup. And yet Andrea pronounces the entire episode some "great TV." Cillizza nods and agrees wisely, as if he knows exactly what she means while both of them gabble about whether it's "presidential."

The other side of that coin

Now I want you to imagine a different episode of this particular show. In this one, Obama is giving a speech somewhere and gets heckled, as has been the case at most of his events this year. Instead of tossing his "Don't get mad, vote!" line at the hecklers, he goes off. Loses his temper, tells the hecklers to shut up and sit down because no one -- NO ONE -- has worked harder to (fill in the blank here) than he has, and that person heckling him has no damn idea so they should just shut the hell up and sit their asses down.

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