I realize that when you're Luke Russert and you've trained at the knee of Chuckles Todd, there's no good reason for you to actually think about what noxious spew comes out of your mouth before you actually release it into the air. But honestly, this has to be Luke Russert trolling everyone and little more.
Li'l Luke, with appropriately earnest eyes, informs strategist Angela Rye that he's "trying to look for a silver lining in the Democrats' absolute spanking...last week."
Mini-Russert finds his silver linings in the oddest places. The one place he can find a silver lining is if "the Supreme Court were to gut the ACA." Because, of course, it would light a fire under Democrats. Reacting to the other panelists' WTF faces, Luke says he's just talking about the politics of it, of course, not reality like real people losing their homes and their lives and seeing their children languish from chronic conditions they can no longer afford to pay for. Because politics.
Just don't, Luke. If you don't know what the hell you're talking about, STFU and sit down. Or apply over at Fox News. The rest of us are beyond the politics of it. If the Supreme Court guts the ACA, millions of people will lose their health insurance and the small measure of security they've found. Millions. of. People. Flesh and blood humans.
This isn't a damn game here. We're not moving the football toward the goal line. This is life and it is death, and it is not "just for politics."
Seriously, who asks a troll question like that with a straight face?
Digby had a few things to say about his trolling over Joni Ernst in these last couple of weeks:
In fairness, he wasn’t the only one who saw Ernst as the next great Palin hope. I heard at least one pundit say that she was likely to challenge Ted Cruz the minute she gets to Washington. But Russert offered up this vapid assessment without even a hint of substance or real reporting, making him the leader of thin-air cable TV election reporting. Which is saying something.
Without getting into psychoanalysis it’s easy to see why Russert is Russert. He was hired by MSNBC in the wake of his venerated father’s unexpected passing. He was very young and inexperienced and one got the feeling the network hired him as a sort of grief counseling for themselves and the family. But they did him no favors. They immediately sent him up to Capitol Hill and put him on camera where instead of developing his own craft he aped his dad’s Villager punditry, a ludicrous style for such a green kid, based as it was on Russert senior’s decades of “old hand” experience in politics. This bizarre “sage” style has remained with him leading to such laughable results as his vacuous coverage of Joni Ernst.
She's too kind. After watching that clip a couple of times, I'd say he's developed most of his style right from Chuck Todd. That tone and bratty grin at the beginning could just as easily have been used to read us the White House soup menu of the day as to troll over what might energize the Democratic base.
What will energize Democrats? Seeing President Obama intentionally explode conservative heads with executive orders and calls for the FCC to properly regulate ISPs for net neutrality. That will energize us.
Gutting the Affordable Care Act will just kill us. For real.
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