Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple and his website handlers tried this clickbait headline on Friday: “We nominate Rachel Maddow for CEO, Republican presidential debates.”
Why? Wemple is impressed that Maddow is now trashing CNN like she trashed Fox for how they selected the tiers of Republican debaters, specifically CNN now adding in Carly Fiorina (and Chris Christie) for an eleven-candidate debate. The feminist doesn’t like the woman added? Maddow editorialized on Thursday night:
MADDOW: I believe that was a fairly ridiculous decision and they taped the kids' table debate in an empty arena. They kept showing in all of the camera angles how empty the arena was. This was a really big insult to those candidates. That was the first debate. Fox News did that.
But now that we have the second debate, CNN for whatever reason, they've decided to stick to that format, that Fox News invented. That magic number of ten candidates, led into the real debate and everybody else forced to do some other thing. Except in CNN's case, after they had said that's the way they'd do it, they later decided after the fact that their magic number would not be ten, it would 11....
It's amazing. It's amazing. It's amazing. I mean, it's one thing for Fox to kind of fudge this because you think, oh, Fox is a Republican organization, they have someone who they want to win and they'll run things in a way that allows that person favorable treatment. For CNN to do this, it`s just -- I mean, it`s worse than catches catch can -- I won`t say really what I think it is.
I find it amazing this is the way that any major political party is picking their presidential candidate this year. It's a total mess.
May we remind Mr. Wemple that MSNBC-run GOP debates four years ago included that lyin' Brian Williams asking Rick Perry if he "struggled to sleep at night" after executions in Texas.
Wemple concluded:
Except for one omission: The Fox News approach, despite a sparse crowd at Quicken Loans Arena to greet the JV team, actually produced an outstanding civic clash — one that drew plaudits from an array of commentators. CNN faces quite a challenge to match its competitor. Next time around, Maddow should just take a leave of absence and run these things herself.
Once again, Maddow is demonstrating her brain lives in a strange universe where Fox News is a “Republican organization” and her Thrill Up My Leg network is a cornucopia of diverse viewpoints that has no political objectives and somehow doesn’t sound like DNC-TV on an issue like, say, Planned Parenthood.
