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Producers and their minions are the folks who book the guests on these shows (with a huge bit of help from the on-air "talent" of course). And producers book people who (a) answer their phones and (b) they are comfortable with. Over the last two decades, these folks have gotten very comfortable if not downright cozy with their reactionary guests. Everybody's rich, they all go the same parties, socialize and intermarry, and it's just so easy to call your old pal to come on for a 15-minute segment; chances are he's right down the street and has his own make-up kit in the Green Room.
But I saw Howard Dean this morning on the Today show. The show ran a piece that could have been called "Democratic party superdelegates: Outright terrorists, or just subverters of democracy?" Dean came on, and David Gregory was framing furiously, wanting to know how the Democrats were going to solve this unprecedented crisis of not having decided on a candidate by March 6 of an election year?
Dean bore up manfully under the onslaught of ignorant blather, and finally squeezed a word in edge-wise about superdelegates. He said that superdelegates were not elite shadowy figures hiding out in smoke-filled rooms, but were drawn from the rank and file of the Democratic party, representing a fair cross-section of the Democratic party as a whole. That is, they were men AND women, rich AND poor, office holders AND voters.
Gregory almost literally waved the comment aside to go back to the burning issue of the Democrats' failure to decide on one candidate, and how it was all going to be decided in a shadowy world of back rooms by nameless, faceless elites. Dean reiterated what he had just fucking said to Gregory about the superdelegates, and Gregory ended the chat a couple of moments later with the ominous sobriquet that the story would continue.
Yeah, the story will continue because it's apparently not quite sunk in to the public consciousness that the Democrats are a bunch of elitist haters of democracy who will select their candidate any old way they please, the voters be damned. Gregory is hopeful that the next person he tries to trap on the air with nice-sounding stupidity won't call him on it.
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