Joan Walsh used to be an MSNBC regular. It's clear she is still watching MSNBC, because she became really upset on Wednesday night during Alex Wagner tonight when NPR Morning Edition anchor Steve Inskeep was plugging his latest historical book on "how Abraham Lincoln succeeded in a divided America."
This was her tweet/post:
Tragic. Comic? Steve Inskeep is on my TV both sidesing this shitshow. Dems didn't act on "principle" in not helping out McCarthy. Maybe it's a principle not to trust liars who renege on deals, or who wouldn't ratify Biden's Electoral College win. So deeply terrible.
— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) October 4, 2023
How did McCarthy fail to "ratify Biden's Electoral College win"? Democrats voted with the "far right" on this one. But you can't claim the Democrats did anything cynical, it's all High Principle all the time!
Underneath that, it became more comical, from a leftist account "Egbert Souse":
Inskeep is why I stopped listening to Nice Polite Republicans many years ago.
Anyone claiming NPR is a Republican network isn't listening, and isn't looking at the political donations of NPR employees. Wagner got Inskeep in trouble for comparing Lincoln's situation to the current situation:
This is where it went wrong:
WAGNER: You make the good point in the book that Lincoln was someone ready to have difficult conversations and ready to have sort of polite disagreements with one another. And I would suggest to you that the chasm separating the parties is such that it's hard to imagine sort of camaraderie in the same way. And yet, when you look at the way in which Democrats, with very little apology, secured Kevin Mccarthy's fate as an ousted speaker, one wonders if Mccarthy had played that hand with Democrats a little bit differently, if he had not perchance gone on the Sunday shows and said that the potential government shutdown was all their fault. If he had made more of an overture towards Democrats, could his speakership have been saved?
INSKEEP: I think Democrats probably did not act on personal considerations, but on their calculation of their interests -- just as Mccarthy was acting as he thought, on his interests. And there may well have been a different politics, where Democrats would have seen him to be in their interest to prop up Mccarthy. But they had so many substantive differences, it seems clear to me that they wanted Republicans to have to sort out their house themselves.
WAGNER: Even though the net result may be a more radical far-right speaker.
Alex Wagner claimed Biden is much more amenable to non-MAGA Republicans, and Inskeep agreed. "Biden, I'm not going to judge whether he's doing well or badly, but he's clearly attempting that Lincoln style of politics. I want to deal with this person that I disagree with on nine issues, but there's a tenth way we can do business."
Is that really what Republicans think about his grand "saving Democracy from the Republicans" speeches?
