Chuck Todd Has (Another) Sad

From time to time, Chuck Todd has a tantrum about politics. Back in 2012, he blew up after former General Electric chairman Jack Welch speculated that the Obama Administration "cooked" the unemployment numbers right before the Presidential election. More recently, he had the nerve to ask the President whether he (Obama) owed the country an apology because healthcare.gov was a little glitchy when it was launched (never mind the <crickets> from NBC's Chief White House Correspondent once more than 8 million people used said website to sign up for health insurance).

Now, Chuck Todd has gone on another screed. His target this time is a resolution House Republicans approved that will allow them to sue President Obama which, some have said, is a harbinger of a potential move to impeach him. But don't worry, folks, Chuck Todd is not calling out Republicans for the utter lack of justification for this action. Rather, he finds the politics unsavory and unrealistic. The policy is of no moment to him. In the cloistered world of D.C. politics, optics matter above all else, so Chuck Todd focuses on the infeasibility of impeachment, not the absence of a foundation for it. [1] If Chuck Todd is so offended, he should  use every second of every minute of every hour of the five-day-a-week platform he has as host of The Daily Rundown to mock and shame Republicans who would even raise the specter of impeachment, but no, Chuck Todd is just uncomfortable with appearances. 

Naturally, he also castigates Democrats for having the temerity to raise money off of multiple on-the-record statements by elected Republicans that the President should in fact be impeached. And of course, nowhere in Todd's harangue is the responsibility of the media (of which he is a member in good standing) for coddling the darkest and ugliest impulses of Republicans, who have spent the President's entire term in office maligning him in the most personal, and sometimes racist terms imaginable, because people like Chuck Todd just write this stuff off as politics as usual.

I do not know whether Chuck Todd was being serious or rhetorical when he said "[t]hey're driving people away from the polls, they're driving people away from politics. This is cynical, it's ugly, it's disgusting."  That is true so far as it goes, but his total lack of awareness of the "Beltway" media's culpability in this is axiomatic and obvious to anyone who lives outside Interstate 495. You see the DC media long ago relinquished its responsibility to objectively report the news of the day and instead became, as Jon Stewart observed, the kid in high school who eggs on the fight by saying "you gonna take that shit?" Of course, it is easier for Chuck Todd and his ilk to write off ideas of impeachment, after all, these same suckers took John Boehner at his word when he said a government shutdown was "off the table," and we all know how that one worked out ….

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END NOTE

1. It's worth noting that the five Republicans who did not vote to sue President Obama did so because they didn't think a lawsuit went far enough (i.e., IMPEACH!).