The Ronna deal

Some might well have agreed with NBC news management. Hiring Ronna McDaniel, the recently felled chair of the Republican Party, would be a good move for the network, lending some balance to their lib-leaning programming. Bringing a Republican ringer in would have steered the course of the whole gang in a more conservative direction, "righting" the course, you might say.

That Ms. McDaniel, who had deliberately erased her family name, Romney, in a move to point out her intra-party loyalties, was obviously talented enough to hold her own behind a microphone.  MSNBC wanted to invite a broader audience to its news programming.

Then, the shit it the fan. Don't know if you saw it or not but on Meet the Press, ye oldest TV program on the air, Chuck Todd, blasted NBC management for that decision, apologizing to moderator Kristin Welker, for having to do what she just had done, interviewing Ronna McDaniel, an interview that was set up before McDaniel had been hired by the network.

Then, Monday morning, the Morning Joe principles went ballistic about it too. NBC News upper management faced a full-fledged revolt. Everybody went hostile, at least most all of NBC's on-air stars.

Yesterday, management reversed field and broke off whatever handshake existed between the network and Ms. McDaniel. So much for the uprising. The stars won the day.

I haven't checked but I'm guessing Laura Ingram and her ilk will point at the whole mess and giggle about "lib censorship" scribbling it on every last post-it in the office. "So much for 'balance' among the lefties--they throw a conservative under the bus." You know how that goes.

But if I were Chuck Todd, I'd have come out swinging at management too--not because Ronna McDaniel was the kind of conservative voice MSNBC's gang of libs couldn't stand, but because she was MAGA's co-chair. She sold the "stop the steal" madness as wholesale as anyone. She simply repeated Trump's lies. Hers was among the strongest voices claiming MSNBC was "fake news." She was no friend of the network, nor any of its principles.

As Todd maintained on Meet the Press Sunday morning, how could viewers trust the commentary of anyone who'd climbed on the "Stop the Steal" bandwagon? When, on Sunday morning, she was asked about her appraisal of the 2020 election she said something to the effect of this sort of thing: in her position as Party Chair, she really had to play with the team. For the record, on Sunday morning, she said Biden won the 2020 election. 

That turn of mind is what's ailing this country. Trump is one thing, but when Republican stalwarts like John Thune and Randy Feenstra take one for the team and say nothing at all about Trump's silly "American Bible," that's why we're in the pickle we are as a nation.

Chuck Todd was right. Why should anyone believe Ronna McDonald on Sunday morning, when she says, in truth, there was no rigged election? She'd sung a wholly different song just a week or so ago when she was a soloist in Trump's choir. 

I can't help but believe that maybe someday people will look back on the days of Trump and point at "Stop the Steal" as the lie it was right from the beginning, and how that outright lie steamrolled through the American electorate and created the ills suffered thereafter--for how many years is yet to be determined. 

"He who sups with the Devil best use a long spoon."