Yes, MSNBC's two remaining heavy hitters, Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachael Maddow, want to make it very clear that they lurve The New York Times.

Lurve, lurve, lurve the Times. Because New Amsterdam is a small town for people in the media business, and you never know when you'll need the favor of the dragon on the mountain, so whenever you approach the dragon, 'tis best to first make supplications. What a mighty tail you have. And such glossy scales. And have you done something with your hair? It seems so bouncy and manageable.

First, always declaim your lurve. Its depth and irreplaceability

Take it away, Edgar Allan Poe:

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.

It's just that, well, sometimes, the Times gets drunk. After all, it's under a lot of stress and has many mouths to feed. And when it gets a little drunk, sometimes it gets reckless. And verbally abusive. And sometimes -- well, frequently -- it uses the media clout it harvests from its loyal readers like Mr. O'Donnell and Ms. Maddow to engage in petty, vindictive, democracy-corroding vendettas on the paper's front page. And because it is the dragon on the mountain, those petty, vindictive, democracy-corroding vendettas tend to get the whole media herd moving in that direction.

Day after day after day.

But if we just stick with it. Praise it. Laud it. And then, and only then, gingerly approach any criticism of its democracy-corroding bad habits with a very long, very soft pair of salad tongs, then maybe it'll change. Because in there, somewhere, buried beneath all the David Frenches and David Brookses and Bret Stephenses. Beneath the insipid Aaron Sorkin claptrap and the guest columns routinely tossed out despicable wingnuts like plastic Mardi Gras beads. Beneath all of that and this (from Left Jabs) --

They kicked Joe Biden when he was down. Over seven days, they published 142 news articles and 50 opinion pieces about it. All on the website homepage, all “above the fold.” It was a long scroll before you came to anything else.
-- surely there is still a great American newspaper in there somewhere.

And apparently the plan is for all of us to wait around patiently until that newspaper shows up.

Take it away, Mary Chapin Carpenter:

Hey baby tell me what we're gonna do
It's getting crazy and I need some help from you
We were so connected that you were a part of me
Now I feel an emptiness right to the heart of me

But you pretend and I pretend
That everything is fine
And though we should be at an end
It's so hard admittin'
When it's quittin' time...

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: So, you know, Kamala Harris has had the single best first day of any presidential candidate in history, and that was yesterday. She also just had the best second day in history of any presidential candidate and has very, very quickly snuffed out this dream that was being thrown around by the people who were very eager to get Joe Biden off the ticket.

This is a dream that's been thrown around for the better part of a year, that we could have what they would call an exciting convention where this could be a contested nomination.

The New York Times, in its editorial urging Joe Biden to drop out of the race, used the word "exciting."Every time I saw that word "exciting," I was reading the word "chaos" as the other alternative.

And indeed, indeed, The New York Times yesterday afternoon used the word "chaos" to describe right away in a headline the condition that they so eagerly awaited to get to here.

RACHEL MADDOW: Can I interject just for a moment, just to underscore what it is you're saying. I love The New York Times with the heat of a thousand cents, but their editorial page on this issue was a megaphone on repeat for not just weeks, but months.

"Biden must get out! Biden must get out! Biden must get out! Biden must get out!"

And then as soon as Biden gets out, "chaos!!!"

Biden is gone. Biden has gotten out. It's so terrible. I mean, I don't know what is going on at The New York Times, but their editorial position is so chin out, so confident while simultaneously being so internally contradictory and ridiculous. I mean, I have so much respect for The New York Times, but they are on Planet Somewhere Else.

O'DONNELL: Yeah, I still, and I always say this whenever I criticize The Times, which isn't very often, it's the best newspaper that is available to us and remains that even on its bad days.

But you know, one of the things that The Times did not know until I had to reveal it on television because it didn't exist as a fact in political media in America until February after Ezra Klein's piece came out in The Times urging Biden to step aside and so many others had come out.

None of them knew that the money could only go to Kamala Harris. So they were throwing out this idea without the vaguest understanding of something that everyone knows is one of the most important, if not the most important element in political campaigns: money. None of them knew anything about that when they were throwing this around. And so they've learned gradually. And you know, I wasn't countering their arguments when I would discuss this. I was just pointing out all the things they didn't know, including the massive structural advantage that Kamala Harris would have and the extreme reluctance of anyone to want to run against her.

Republished with permission from Driftglass.