Madcow Maddow and Trump's tax return

The screengrab from Facebook says it all. Link is here.

First, for anybody who objects to the exact phrasing of my name for Rachel Maddow, it's alliterative and semi-rhyming. It's not meant to be sexist. What if I called her Bum Steer Maddow, to be politically correct and follow Texas Monthly's annual awards for numbnuts Texans?

As for the last lines of the screengrab? This. The Russian government claims that Clinton campaign representatives met with the US ambassador to Russia last year. Just like Jeff Sessions. And, yes, Putin said he preferred Trump. Doesn't mean that he wouldn't have worked with Clinton. Doesn't mean that Trump was a Manchurian Candidate. I know Clintonistas still grasping to that #PutinDidIt straw don't like to admit that.

(And, no, that doesn't mean moral equivalence. That said, if you can't take time to Google "Frank Giustra" plus "uranium" plus "Clinton Foundation" to see the millions that the Clintoris Foundation got from atomic Friends of Vlad, and why, let me help you. (Oh, and contra Bloomberg or whatever, no, Hillary did indeed try to hide this, through not disclosing it, despite an agreement to do so.)

Also, Glenn Greenwald informs us — I Tweeted the link to Maddow — that more and more national-level apparatchiks of the Democratic Party, including those like James Clapper who have little compulsion about lying when necessary, are informing us there's no silver bullet, there's no smoking gun, there's nothing close to that.

At the same time, the man likely to have been named Clinton's CIA director is admitting there's nothing behind Trump-Putin collusion claims, which is the flip side of the same coin. Also per Morill, the Christopher Steele documents are bullshit, including paying informants.

In addition, Jeffery Carr reports that the Russians who allegedly hacked Yahoo were independent actors, not carrying out an official mission.

In fact (foreshadowing) there's not much more than a nothingburger, both on the tax returns and the "Putin did it" nonsense.

That said, her Tuesday night show illustrated to a T just why I've had minimum high regard for her — to use the Congressional floor put-down — for more than half a decade. She's a Dems-only liberal who often can't even think to the left edge of the Democratic Party, let alone beyond.

Don't take just my word for it, though.

Read friend Brains' brief skewering. He's not the only friend of mine to reference Geraldo Rivera Jerry Rivers and Al Capone's vault.

Or take the more in-depth account of Bob Somersby, "Headlong pursuit of the nothingburger."

His first big take?

"Maddow's tweets touched off a stampede among two growing demographics—the highly gullible and the easily excited."

But here's the real big take:

The stampede about the nothingburger had wiped a wide range of weightier topics from last night's cable air: 

Gone was discussion of the GOP health plan, which had been imploding. Gone was discussion of the expectation that information would drop today about Trump's wiretapping claims. 

Gone, long gone, was Donald J. Trump and Russia. Instead, we had our silliest cable star pimping a tiny bit of information which basically seemed to serve the interests of Donald J. Trump. 

It's very hard for liberals to see what a self-adoring circus clown Maddow has become. Last night, she staged a giant stampede over the latest shiny object—over a nothingburger. 

Is it possible that Donald J. Trump leaked the shiny object himself? In the very first words out of his mouth, that's what Johnston had said. 

Final point: 

Also gone from last night's air was any discussion of Chris Hayes' trip to West Virginia. [That's the trip where Bernie Sanders met with coal miners.] The trip had produced an hour of powerful politics only one night before.

That's a pretty good summary.

But, let's go back to Bob's nutgraf:

It's very hard for liberals to see what a self-adoring circus clown Maddow has become.

And, that's the bottom line — that she IS "a self-adoring circus clown."

She also, in her work to puff ratings, will tow the Comcast bottom line — twice! That's both for Comcast owning MSNBC and it being a cable channel, often going across Comcast coaxial.

That said, Somersby has liked kicking Maddow, in part because the problem above becomes more obvious as her viewership has grown post-election. Hit this search link for more. In short, to be blunter than him? She's become ever more of a ratings whore. Or a ratings pimp. Choose your language.

As for Maddow Maniacs' claim that "she would never do that? You're clueless at a minimum, and may have rectal-cranial inversion syndrome at a maximum. Or, per a new Somersby, you must be part of the cult of Maddow. And it is.

As for the nickname? While I acknowledge that claims of sexism are sometimes true, so too are claims of political correctness. Also given the riff on "mad cow disease," I'm staying with the nickname. (And, see the paragraph above.)

And, just because I choose to explain it, or defend it, doesn't mean I'm defensive about it. Even if you're not part of the cult, if you don't like it? I'm OK with that. In any case, it works for me.

(Update, March 25: I now see I'm not the only person to call Maddow "Madcow," and Tim Black gets paid public media commentator money [and from the left, not the right] to do just that!)

That said, if we're speaking of taxes, hey, Rhodes scholar, Oxford grad, Stanford grad, left-neoliberal Maddow? Why not reveal yours? Let's see how charitable a good liberal is. She makes an estimates $7M a year, and, actually, if she's almost an Eisenhower Republican, isn't that liberal. The truth about Ike, and her claims about Ike, are refudiated thoroughly here. All this goes back to librulzs' desperate romance with Al Franken et al on Air America, or Keith Olbermann, while ignoring the likes of Pacifica. (That said, the $7M actually leaves her as a bit of a piker compared to the pay scale for many teevee talking heads.)

Yes, that's a little bit of gotcha. And?

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In turn, the self-puffery and other-puffery of the likes of Maddow show just what's wrong with mainstream liberalism's version of The Resistance.

An anonymous donor gives $1 million to The "The" New York Times for student subscriptions. Why not Counterpunch or Alternet? In turn, that reminds me of the high level of Peter Principle in today's media. And, yes, it's high. About as high, at national levels, as in the political system it purports to keep tabs on.

The lauding of Preet Bharara despite lack of criminal convictions of banksters is another puffery.

Don't get me wrong — the NYT is better than Breitbart and Bharara is better than Jeff Sessions. But, that's praising with faint damns.

But, seriously, if Democrats and their mainstream media allies expect a better-quality #resistance that will change the national-level electoral equation not just since 2016, but in some sense since the 2010 midterms, they need to up their game.