Campbell Brown: And for those people who have been worried about the possibility of one party controlling Congress and the White House, the last president to do that was?
John King: That was Bill Clinton and--
Campbell Brown: --Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton had Democrats in the House and the Senate?
John King: Very briefly.
Campbell Brown. Very briefly. It didn't go so well.
John King: No it didn't.
Hey, I'd like to forget the Bush Administration, too, but you don't have to go back to Clinton much less Carter to find a single party in control of government. Of course, being part of the best political team on television doesn't require knowing basic political facts like who controlled branches of the U.S. Government during the current Administration.
For the record, however, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress in 2001 until Jeffords left the GOP caucus. Then regained control in 2003 and held it until January 2007. But, clearly, it was that eighteen months of one-party Democratic control of government under Bill Clinton that didn't go well. I know because Campbell Brown and John King just told me so.
This is our press in action. It's not just that they're dishonest, they're also incredibly stupid. They don't know what they're talking about, routinely getting basic facts wrong, and people rely on them for information about their government and their lives.
Any change has to start with the media. You cannot make good decisions with bad information.
UPDATE People read it here first, though, Lord Eschaton. --lambert
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Oh, I Knew I Shouldn't Have
So, I switch to CNN and it was easily the worst commentary I've heard all night. Terrible rubbish; just terrible.
BDBlue quotes of them is very much typical of their coverage, tonight.
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...
Yes, The Awfulness Wasn't Limited to the Above Exchange
It's illustrated by the above exchange. Moronic doesn't even begin to describe CNN's coverage.
Did you know Congressional Dems will bend to Obama because they owe their seats to him? That's probably going to be news to Mark Warner who did much better in Virginia than Obama did. Or Kay Hagan who did much better in NC.
Did you know the youth vote turned out this year for Obama? Neither did I. And watching CNN didn't change that because while I heard many people credit the youth vote, none of them cited any polls that supported the assertion that young people made up a higher percentage of the electorate than they usually do. I have no idea if the youth vote went up this year as a percentage of the electorate or not. Thanks, CNN!
Another highlight was Gloria Borger telling folks that no one knew what Obama was going to do as President. Hmmm, if only there were people whose job it was to figure out what politicians propose doing while they're running for office for two years.
And on and on.
The entire thing was appalling for its shallowness, vapidness, and routine factual errors.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
Gloria Borger
Yep, she was the one I was talking about. I couldn't believe when she said that. I changed the channel, and now I remember why I stopped watching them in the first place.
Flipped to MSNBC and Chris was having another Ogasm. Flipped back to NBC and normally steady Brian Williams is gushing.
Is this really what we have to go through for the next four to eight years? I don't know how I'm going to make it.
As Lambert so poignantly asks: And we get...? If liberals are to suffer, I ask for the FSM to send us a savior.
And, to add insult to injury, one of Detroit's papers had posted up some heresay/analysis about Obama asking Palin to be Secretary of the Department of the Interior, but it was quickly taken down. WTF
?
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...
BDBlue
An hour ago, I heard Brian Williams talking with David Pflouffe (however the hell you spell his name), and joked about him concerned the "M word" or mandate. Have they actually seen the popular vote count? Notice how the popular vote count is MIA, this year.
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...
Be reasonable, BDB
They were trying to give a cautionary about the dangers of a single-party government.
Nothing untoward happened during the recent era of GOP-only governance, so it wouldn't suffice as an example, would it?
Shoot me now.
The inane babbling all night was painful. The stupidity. The puffed up self-importance. The mandates from the middle. It was thick and heavy, and went all night long. Even the most ardent media-critique bloggers would be hard-pressed to take the guns out of their mouths long enough to put it down and post the atrocities.
Kudos to Fox, though: their graphic election results - along the bottom quarter of the screen - were the most legible, and packed the most information in the small space, including incumbents, and the ability to keep the POTUS results on screen at all times. At the slightest hint that Bill Kristol was about to open his mouth, you could just mute the damn thing.
If Somerby doesn't remember it
Did the GOP holding the White House, Senate and Congress two years ago ever even happen?
And if he does remember it, isn't that incredibly rude of him (in a grumpy old know-it-all grampa kind of way)?
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Around these parts we call cucumber slices circle bites
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I'm not such a bad guy once you get to know me.