Eliot

I am enjoying him a lot lately. Maybe I am just overcome by anxiety about November, but he seems really sane and levelheaded these days.

I didn't catch much of the show today, but I did hear Joe mention that Trump supposedly incriminated himself during his MTP interview yesterday. Other than that, did anyone on the panel have the courage to address what an overall failure that interview was?

Ignatius kept saying “no one is talking about it.” And that is just outright false. *Everyone* is talking about it; it is the only thing they talk about wrt Biden, and very few people bring up the obvious fact that his likely Republican challenger is pretty much the same age. So he was doubly annoying today because he was pretending like he was making this earth-shatteringly shocking revelation when he was really just regurgitating tired, worn out tropes. And anyway, the point of his editorial was not Biden’s age. The subtext in the piece was his disdain for Harris. And, once again, he could not point to any specific reason to criticize her. Although we all know what he was really talking about. Mika and Claire were both right to call him on it. She did, and he could not answer. He just kept blabbering his own pompous, disingenuous nonsense.

Mika was 100% right. If anything, she was too gentle with him. Especially when it comes to Harris. The vice presidency has historically been a low profile rule. Their job is to support the president and stay out of the way, and she has done that. Ignatius’s comments about her were vague. He can’t point to anything she has or has not done that warrants his criticism and Mika was right to call him out on that. I believe his attitude is steeped in racism and sexism. And it is very obvious. I still remember him on the panel waxing poetic in 2016 about how Trump was going to develop a “governing philosophy” that was going to carry him through his presidency. Ignatius looked and sounded like a fool then and he looks and sounds like a fool today. The Ignatius column adds nothing to the conversation. His contention that “no one” is talking about Biden’s age is absurd; it’s the ONLY thing the pundits talk about.

Agree. I think what it showed was that Logan was the entire world to Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, but they were not his whole world.

I think he was still uncertain. That’s why he was quizzing Shiv in that scene; just testing out to see whether the Matsson offer was real. He didn’t tell her it was him until he had confirmed in his own mind that he had the job. Also, I disagree with folks who say that Shiv was making her choice for Tom and their baby. The show runners did not know Sarah Snook was pregnant when they were planning the season, and to them, at least according to accounts that I have read, the pregnancy was kind of an afterthought. Kind of like it was to Shiv. I think ultimately it came down to a vote against Kendall versus a vote for Tom/Matsson. And she was right. He couldn’t do the job. I haven’t seen this brought up anywhere else, but I thought that video with Logan was very telling. He was having a real family moment with his real (work) family. It kind of echoed the juxtaposition in the opening credits of Logan first at the table with his children, and then fading to Logan at the table with his key executives. That was ultimately where his heart lived, never with his children.

He didn’t, though. Greg eavesdropped on their conversation using Google translate.

Well, they really just wanted daddy’s approval. Which none of them ever got.

Today’s weather chyron informed us all that storms are “wrecking havoc” across the nation. I have been ragging on Mika for years for her poor reading of the Teleprompter, but maybe it’s just that the production people are illiterate.

What is Mika’s beef with Alec Baldwin? She seems unnaturally focused on him; FFS, she just tried to awkwardly compare his shooting case to the California mass murders with some weird, convoluted statement about gun safety.

Long fawning interview with Nancy Mace this morning (or Nancy “Grace” as Ari Melber kept calling her the other night) and they couldn’t even be bothered to point out that she voted for the very anti abortion legislation she was complaining about! Even Andrea Mitchell managed to stammer out that observation on her show today.

Jen Psaki is a natural! Great seeing her on the panel; she adds insight and gravitas while also being fun.

Chuck Todd did it yesterday too. Then again, I really don’t expect anything more from him.

At least when the odious Chris Matthews insisted on mispronouncing Dick Cheney‘s last name as “Cheeney,” he explained that that was because he had heard somewhere it was the official pronunciation. That was dumb too, but at least there was a rationale behind it other than laziness. Joy is the worst with mispronunciations. She continually mispronounced former White House counsel Don McGahn as “Don McGawn.” It irritated me that it irritated me.

It grinds my gears big time that neither Joy Reid nor Alex Wagner can bring herself to pronounce Sinema’s first name properly. It is not “Kristin.” It is “Kyrsten.” I also was offended by Joy using a clip from Fatal Attraction, one of the most misogynistic movies of its decade, to tease the segment about Sinema.

Senator Claire is ON FIRE today and I am here for it. Why does Joe skirt around all his previous anti-abortion statements and positions now?

Yes, that was striking to me as well. Better late than never, I guess. And I heart Michael Steele. Never thought I’d say this, but he is just so wise and hilarious at the same time.

I think I am now I hate watching Elise’s focus group. Today, one of the participants blamed Antifa for the insurrection. Because he had looked at photos in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and claimed that the participants were all “hipsters in skinny jeans with beards.” ETA: Out of morbid curiosity, I went to the AJC website to see their coverage and determine if there was anything to his claim. Not a hipster in sight.

I think people get it; it’s not that hard to figure out, even if it weren’t a well known cliche. Doesn’t mean people can’t think it’s trite. Especially when you’re talking about a dead infant.

That was an amusing moment. The guy complaining about MLK seemed to realize as the words were coming out of his mouth how awful they sounded; he cut himself off after saying something like, "I'm so sick of hearing about...uh...never mind." But Elise lost points with me in her follow up with Joe and Mika when she was talking about the "extremes on both sides" of the abortion debate. She compared abortion opponents who want every abortion banned in every case with abortion rights supporters who, according to her, "support any abortion, any time, for any reason." She fell into the trap of absurd hypotheticals ("abortion up until the moment of birth!") that just don't happen. It was disappointing to me because I was starting to like her.

They succeeded.

I’m with you 100%. The show’s glossing over of most of the real ravages of this disease was a colossal blunder. I get they don’t want to show all the terrible parts, but the way they set it up you’d think having Alzheimer’s is just becoming mildly forgetful and totally docile. As an aside, even during the late stages of his illness, while he could still speak, my dad was able to describe his childhood home in precise detail, including where everyone slept.

I haven’t been watching the show that much, at least not to pay attention to it. But Elise’s focus group just depressed the hell out of me this morning. That one woman who spoke, the one who said, “Are you happy now?” had a look of such spite and bitterness on her face… just utter hatred. It made me despair for our country. I think I’m just going to go crawl back into my bed and die now.

I don’t understand why that would be unusual. Plenty of women put off having children until they’re in their 30s. Especially if they are establishing themselves in careers.

If I am recalling this correctly, the doctor said something like, "I got called to the operating room to save a kid who was crashing....I never thought..." Can't remember the exact words, but he absolutely made a correlation between the two.