Some of the worst excesses of cable news happen on their handoffs between programs, starting with CNN's Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon. But on Wednesday night, Jordan Davidson at The Federalist reports Joy Reid took the handoff from Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC by comparing the Republican Party to the tyrannical Baath Party of Saddam Hussein.
The Reidout began with Reid asking: “I wonder if Liz Cheney, her statement being the thing that Republicans used — I mean, the Democrats used, sorry — to explain why they needed to impeach Donald Trump, is there a little wing of the Republican Party that you think can do this sort of de-Baathification of the party? And can it work at this point?”
No one noticed the irony -- "de-Baathification" was scorned by lefty media outlets from The New York Times to al-Jazeera as a disastrous Bush-Cheney "debacle" that mucked up post-war Iraq. All that matters is the gleeful association Trump = Saddam.
But Wallace agreed, saying Liz Cheney would have a hard time excising the "rot" of Trumpism:
I think the challenge is that the rot is from the grassroots all the way to the presidency. So the rot is at every layer. You can call it rot because it’s now criminal sedition. But there are people that supported it from the grassroots all the way up through to the White House.
She added: “What became clear to me today is that whatever party Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney think they’re in, it isn’t the same party that Don Jr.’s going to run under. So I think you see the beginning of the end of one banner flying over Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. That banner will not be the name of the party that describes both of them years from today."
