The People Are Clamoring For Ronna (Romney) McDaniel!

Taylor Swift times Beyonce right here.

Credibility, so difficult to build, so quickly destroyed! Womp womp to NBC and their senior vice president for politics, Carrie Budoff Brown, who made coleslaw of their reputations this weekend by announcing they’d be paying booted RNC chair Ronna (Romney) McDaniel $300,000 a year to spin some bullshit as a “correspondent.” NBC is supposedly a news organization, and McDaniel is an inveterate liar, but somehow the company that just laid off 150 employees decided priority number one was finding some cash to shove her way.

She ain’t just any old fibber, either, but an ultra-MAGA unrepentant election denier who actively tried to obstruct election certification and used “election irregularity” conspiracy theories to fundraise and loot coffers for Trump, which seems pretty straight-up fraudy. She was intimately involved in the “fake electors” criminal enterprise, and actively helped put together the team of “alternative electors” in Michigan, where she was once GOP chair. She called the violence of January 6 “legitimate political discourse,” and put Sidney Powell on the RNC’s Twitter feed, claiming Trump won by “a landslide.” Remember when she was caught on tape with the Michigan fake electors?

“If you can go home tonight, do not sign [the certification for Joe Biden]. … We will get you attorneys,” McDaniel was recorded telling Wayne County Michigan Canvassers William Hartmann and Monica Palmer. (Wayne County is Detroit. Biden won Wayne County 68-30. Frankly, seems low.) 

Even literal years after it was very clear that Trump lost, McDaniel kept shilling the election-denying snake oil, and as recently as last year refused to say Biden’s win was “fair.” She blamed “the media” for “refusing” to report her outlandish claims, talking some made-up shit about voting machine glitches, and was so side-eye ridiculous about it even Fox News’s Bret Baier pushed back on her wondering where the evidence was, which she insisted was going to be dropped any minute. “We have seen a lot of irregularities, Bret. [In Michigan] we’ve been pursuing reports coming in on our hotline, people who were disenfranchised from observing the vote count and some more serious allegations that we’re seeing. It is serious.”

She described a completely made-up situation where “hundreds of witnesses who talk about being disenfranchised and being removed from counting centers as election workers cheered as they were removed.”

HUNDREDS!

“The fact that we were there has allowed us to show what happens when person after person in Detroit was removed. If you left to go to the bathroom you weren’t allowed back in. I’m not hearing this from reports or hearsay or the internet. I know these people.”

(She did not, and this did not happen. It is also not “disenfranchising” someone to remove them as an election observer, unless the election observers thought they were there to cast votes, which might have been part of the problem.)

Ronna the Conna also offered up fantastical tales of her own, such as that 30,000 illegal votes were cast in Arizona, a lie she kept running with long after Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien and speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives Rusty Bowers directly told Trump that it wasn’t true.

She also censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for daring to join the House January 6 Select Committee, and called MSNBC reporters propagandists:

She urged Nikki Haley to drop out of the presidential race so Little Lord Fucklewad wouldn’t have to deal with another candidate making frowny faces at him. But Carrie Budoff Brown thinks that’s just the kind of both-sidesing the world needs to hear more of today! Over the weekend Brown couldn’t say enough nice things about the lady who hissed and spit like a cat with distemper at her organization for years.

 “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team. [...] As we gear up for the longest general election season in recent memory, she will support our leading coverage by providing an insider’s perspective on national politics and on the future of the Republican Party — which she led through some of the most turbulent and challenging moments in political history.”

Somehow this degrading display of Olympic-level kiss-assery did not win over viewers and McDaniel’s future co-workers, who are fucking pissed. Why bother going to journalism school and working for crap wages for years because you believe in the virtue of reporting facts, only to have a grifter getting paid more than you? Even Chuck Todd can’t take it!

Within a day MSNBC’s president Rashida Jones was telling staff that McDaniel would not appear on MSNBC after all. She’d only appear on NBC News, which was in the top-three most trusted news organizations, and to comment on elections.

And Sunday morning she appeared anyway, taking her lip filler to “Meet The Press” to be interviewed by a visibly irritated Kristen Welker, with an apologetic preamble from Chuck Todd. (When you’ve lost Chuck Todd, you know it’s bad.)

"Our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation. You got put into an impossible situation, booking this interview," Todd said. "And then all of a sudden the rug was pulled out from under you, and you find out she's being paid to show up? It is unfortunate for this program, but I am glad you did the best that you could."

Shocking backbone from a man whose interview questions are famous for being as pointed as a cue ball.

Watch it yourself, if you want!

OUCH. Welker did at least squeeze some concessions to reality out of McDaniel, who will now say that Biden did win, but won’t quit insinuating that hinkiness was afoot:

"He won, he is the legitimate president, fair and square. He won, it's certified, it's done. But I do think it's fair to say there were problems in 2020."

She also condemned the violence on January 6, though she’d previously characterized the poop-smearing and bludgeoning and pepper-spraying of police as “legitimate political discourse”:

“I want to be very clear, the violence that happened on January 6 is unacceptable. It doesn’t represent our country,” she said with sudden clarity. “If you attacked our Capitol and […] you’ve been convicted, then that should stay.” So brave!

She also defended the RNC paying Trump's legal bills, "As long as the donors know that that's what they're doing." In case you don’t know, the RNC donor form shows that the first $3,300 of each donation will be directed to the Trump for President primary election account; the next $3,300 will go to his general election account; the next $5,000 will go to Save America (the PAC paying his legal bills) and the next $413,000 is directed to the RNC. After that you might even get some downballot races!

What a deal! Letting him loot the place but backing off on co-signing the violent coup is apparently what passes for a moderate Republican viewpoint nowadays.

What the hell is NBC thinking?

One Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania, told WaPo that the hiring of McDaniel was a “crass commercial decision.” But was it even that? Are NewsMax and OANN viewers now going to start tuning in because Mitt Romney’s niece has made NBC credible to them? Or is it perhaps more likely that the taint of Ronna’s stench is going to sink the network like a stone? 

We shall see!

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