Sometimes people can’t hold in a good laugh, but the hosts of CBS This Morning had a real difficult time holding in their giggling as they interviewed the star of the new show Braindead, Tony Shalhoub, who plays a Republican senator who has alien insects eating away at his brain, causing the lifelong politician to become a "hardline" conservative. During the segment, the hosts of the show couldn't help themselves as they alluded the fact they felt that real life Republicans suffer from the same affliction as the ones on the show.
GAYLE KING: It is so fascinating and so creepy! That is after the bugs have gotten into his head? The senator's head. So tell us about how that all comes about. The meteor crash lands in D.C. And bugs crawling into your brain.
TONY SHALHOUB: Bugs coming out of it. My character says he is a Republican senator from Maryland. He is a guy who is a career politician and he's become a heavy drinker, chases women and is kind of throwing in the towel in terms of his job, his career. Until the infection or, as I like to call it, the enhancement of bugs go and eat part of his brain. The part, it turns out, he didn't need any more and the part holding him down. He stops drinking and cleans up his act and becomes much stronger, much more politically savvy. He is a Republican senator but he moves much, much further to the right and becomes a hard liner and it ups his game in a big way.
The hosts continued to poke and prod into Shalhoub’s character being a Republican, along with continually bringing up how the main character mirrors that of Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you like playing a Republican?
TONY SHALHOUB: I do, actually. It's fun. I get to channel, you know, when we were -- in this particular election cycle, for example, we got to see a whole array because we started the show back when there was still 11, 12 people on that stage....
GAYLE KING: We didn't know who was going to be the nominee.
TONY SHALHOUB: The Republican debate. I had a lot of people to draw from and, you know, I do like this character a lot. He's a bad ass.
NORAH O’DONNELL: He has some Donald Trump qualities.
TONY SHALHOUB: He has some Donald Trump ideologies. Yah, I would say some qualities, but unlike Trump he’s been in politics for a long, long time.
While CBS loved the thought of a show featuring a "hardline", mind controlled Republican, it seems they assumed that Democrats don’t ever exhibit extraterrestrial, odd behavior such as that exhibited the show. Such an example that comes to mind is the time Democrat Hank Johnson (Senator from Georgia), thought withdrawing US Marines from Guam would cause it to “capsize”, something you can only see to believe…
