MSNBC ads on liberal websites like Salon.com are pushing to increase interest and ratings in the badly named show "All In," when it could be titled "A Few In." Or, to quote Dana Carvey's George Bush, "Still Gaining Acceptance." The ad says “Click here to get to know Chris Hayes.” This takes you to the “All In With Chris Hayes” Facebook page.
What you get there is a great sense of just how energetically Hayes is trying to avoid the Obama scandals. Instead, the scandal is the alleged starvation of the public sector:
May 17: “This week the House Agriculture Committee approved a bill that could cut $20 billion from food stamps and kick two million people off the program. Reinhart-Rogoff and Simpson-Bowles aside, austerity is alive and well in Washington.”
There’s also the never-ending scandal of the depredations of capitalism, since Hayes is from The Nation magazine:
May 17: “After the Bangladeshi factory collapse which killed over 1,000 people, several corporations have signed onto an historic safety accord. However, several of the biggest companies have declined. Guess who?”
May 16: “Last month's explosion in West, Texas left a 9-foot deep crater and property damage spread across a 37-block blast radius. Authorities still haven't ruled out intentional sabotague. [sic]”
May 16: “Wage theft is all over the fast food industry. In New York, as many as 84% of workers may have experienced it. Now the state's [liberal] attorney general wants answers.”
Hayes did have time for a Pentagon scandal on May 16: “An estimated 26,000 military sexual assaults occurred in 2012. 0.9% resulted in a conviction.”
No news is too small and local for this page (May 16): “Great, BREAKING news about Florida teen Kiera Wilmot, arrested two weeks for conducting an amateur science experiment: She's not going to be charged with a crime.”
And, on May 15: “Great news out of Michigan today: Cash-strapped Buena Vista public schools are going to open for the remainder of the year after all!”
Also on May 15: "More fast food workers are on strike this week, this time in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Could this be the beginning of a nationwide push to get the minimum wage up to $15 an hour?"
You have to go back a week to May 14 to find any mention of the Obama scandals. On that day, one Facebook post was surprisingly Obama-skeptical: “It's not just the AP's phone records: Some civil liberties advocates think that government secrecy is actually worse under President Obama than under Bush.”
The other is much more typical of MSNBC, always blaming Bush:
Are we gonna spend the next few months beating-up-on the IRS and the Bush-appointed former head of the IRS who was in charge when all of this happened?
Or are we also gonna take the opportunity to try to figure out what exactly we should be doing to sort out this completely intractable mess in tax law created by Citizens United?
