Chuck Todd Yanks Pants Up, Demands To Know Who Sh*t On The Floor

CHUTZPAH!

Chuck Todd has had A EPIPHANY! In year four of the maelstrom of mendacity that is the Trump administration, the esteemed host of "Meet the Press" has finally grokked that the entire Republican platform involves coalescing around a lie and never deviating from it under any circumstance. Like, Ermahgerrrrrd!!! 

Here's Chuck Todd, who covered various Republican lies about Hillary Clinton's Buttery Benghazi Emails and Uranium One , explaining to Rolling Stone that he was SHOCKED, SHOCKED at Republican disingenuousness about the Joe Biden Ukraine smear.

I fully admit, listening to you ask that question now, and me giving you the honest answer of, yeah, I guess I really believed they wouldn't do this. Just so absurdly naive in hindsight. Donald Trump's entire life has been spent using misinformation. His entire life.

Yes, perhaps it was naive for someone who spent his entire life in the media to cover Donald Trump's Republican Party as if it were going to behave like a "normal" political movement. But Chuck Todd's not to blame for treating the rantings of a birther lunatic who thinks windmills spew poison gas as if they might be true. It's not Todd's fault, see, because Donald Trump is a Svengali of lies, who "learned at the feet of a master of deception in Roy Cohn, who learned at the feet of the original master of deception of sort of the modern political era in Joe McCarthy." And who is Chuck Todd, mere mortal, to withstand the supernatural strength of Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy combined, cleverly disguised as a guy who can't string ten coherent words together?

So I mean, look, if people want to read my answer to your question, "Boy, that Chuck Todd was hopelessly naive." Yeah, it looks pretty naive. I think we all made the mistake of not following Toni Morrison's advice, which is when people tell you who they are, believe them. (Ed note: Maya Angelou is the author of this quote.) 

Indeed, Maya Angelou might well read it that way.

Also, too, Chuck Todd has lately realized that his very own show might have been used as a platform to spread misinformation: "So look, whether we'd liked it or not, our platform has been used, or they've attempted to use our platform to essentially disseminate, or to sort of, what I would say, is lay the groundwork for this."

EGADS! You mean Republican senators are actually coming on "Meet the Press" and spewing Russian propaganda in the hope that he'll push back on it so they can turn around and use it to attack journalists, "pretending the media is a liar or fake news and all this stuff, is sport. Trump has turned this into sport."

Look, I'll just be honest, when I had the third senator [to spread Russian disinformation], Senator Ted Cruz, come on my show and do this — who I did not expect to do this — I started to think, he wants the confrontation. He wants to use this for some sort of appeasement of the Right.

I didn't know what else to think. I was stunned because he's a Russia hawk. He spent the entire week showcasing his hawkishness on Russia. Threatening the administration on the pipeline in Germany and really be there. So the reason I, and I'm sorry I ever showed an expression, the reason that the expression on my face went viral, I think, I was genuinely shocked. And by the way, they came to us. They came to us saying they wanted to come on this week. And I really naively thought, maybe he wants to remind people that with Russia [and blaming Ukraine] this is getting ridiculous. And it turned out not to be the case.

Wow, welcome to Planet Earth, Chuck! Nice of you to join us here.

Chuck Todd has various ideas about who's to blame for this problem -- maybe "the previous generation of national reporters missed the story in the moment" about the Iraq, maybe it's "the incentive structure" (you're SO CLOSE!), maybe it's social media, maybe "our biggest problem going into 2020 is that we have two sets of standards simply on political advertising" -- but don't worry, kids, Chucky is ON THE CASE. MTP is doing a very special episode on misinformation, which will doubtless usher in a new era of understanding and media literacy.

And I think that even if a special like this is only seen by people who already believe we have a problem, it is a reminder. I'm a big supporter of something called the News Literacy Project. My fear is the next news consumers: How will they know truth from fiction? How will they have the tools to discern from this?

So this Sunday Chuck Todd will prove to the world once and for all that he's not like those Roger Ailes flunkies with their falsies and spray tans. He's a VRY SRS JOURNALIST who cares about the real-world impact of what he produces. Sure he spent ten thousand hours pretending that Hillary Clinton's email server was a hanging offense, that maybe she deliberately allowed our people to be murdered in that embassy in Libya, that maybe she did sell Vladimir Putin America's Uranium to benefit a Clinton Foundation donor, and that maybe it was her fault that her husband whored around? But now he's going to spend sixty whole minutes reminding people that lying is bad, and that will totally make up for it, right?

OH, PLEASE, DUDE. GET FUCKED.

[ Rolling Stone ]

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