This is very welcome news indeed. Whenever Rachel Maddow is on the teevee, the wife and I race to see who'll be the first to say, "Now why don't they give her a show?" She's extremely intelligent, argues her points well, and has a sort of common sense inisght that's often sorely lacking among the cable talking heads.
According to the NY Times, looks like the day's coming soon when we won't have to ask anymore:
According to the NY Times, looks like the day's coming soon when we won't have to ask anymore:
“At some point, I don’t know when, she should have a show,” said Phil Griffin, hours before he was promoted on Wednesday to president of MSNBC. “She’s on the short list. It’s a very short list. She’s at the top.” [...]I love that woman.
...For MSNBC, which has interpreted the success of Mr. Olbermann’s rants against the Bush administration and other Republican targets as cause to turn its evening programming further to the left, Ms. Maddow has been a relatively easy fit. Sitting in for Mr. Olbermann on July 7, for example, she opened “Countdown” by mocking Senator John McCain, the presumptive presidential nominee, for suggesting that the economy was “slowing.”
“Slowing, senator?” she said. “Try grinding to a halt. But don’t worry, Senator McCain says he can balance the budget by saving all sorts of money when he wins the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”That same night she took the news media at large to task for suggesting that Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, had recently softened plans to withdraw American troops from Iraq.
But Ms. Maddow said that it would be a mistake to paint her broadly as pro-Obama and anti-McCain. “I’m not that much of a typecastable liberal,” she said over lunch. “I am not a fan of either candidate.”
She said, for example, that she disagreed with Mr. Obama’s plan to withdraw one to two combat brigades a month from Iraq. “I wouldn’t want to be serving in the last brigade left,” she said. “I almost think the best way would be to set a date by which you will leave, and let the Pentagon figure out the smartest way to do it.”
Which leads to yet another element of Ms. Maddow’s portfolio: the daughter of an Air Force captain who served stateside during the Vietnam War, she is an admitted defense-policy wonk. “I’m a national security liberal, which I tell people because it’s meant to sound absurd,” she said. “I’m all about counterterrorism. I’m all about the G.I. Bill.”
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July 17, 2008 8:57 PM
Agreed. She rocks.
July 17, 2008 9:42 PM
Doesn't she, though? Much more so than Keith Olbermann these days, in my view, anyway.
His blatant, open partisanship (even if we lean in the same direction) has unfortunately begun to taint what used to be a very fair and - at the time, and still, to some extent - uniquely clear-eyed show.
But then again, that's what's boosting his ratings. As America moves left, so do the networks. Well, that one, anyway.
But now, it's much more often than not when he has Rachel on that he regains that footing. Again, just one man's opinion.
And yeah, she rocks the house.