Though possessed of little actual value, The Rachel Maddow Show does serve to answer an arcane question -- how would Lewis Carroll cover the 2016 presidential campaign?
Maddow was in vintage Alice in Wonderland form last night while recounting a dustup between GOP candidates Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz during a rally for Rowan County clerk Kim Davis after a federal judge ordered her release from jail after refusing to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples.
The event was apparently organized by the Huckabee campaign and Cruz tried to speak with reporters, only to be thwarted by a Huckabee advance man. But while footage showed Cruz being blocked by the Huckabee staffer, Maddow claimed the incident degenerated into "physical fighting" --
Kim Davis is by no means the only person in the country who's in that particular contempt of court boat. I mean, there are local officials in Oregon and in Texas who have been fighting for the right to deny gay people marriage licenses. In Alabama at least 10 counties and potentially as many as 15 counties have stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether in order to keep gay people from getting married, just like Kim Davis did. In North Carolina, more than 30 local magistrates are refusing to issue marriage licenses. So Kim Davis in Kentucky is not alone -- she's just the one who so far has gotten Republican politicians fighting amongst themselves in the most junior high way possible, including physically fighting over her, and her case of course is the national news story right now.
But who knows, maybe the next time there's a rally for her the next time she goes to jail, or maybe the next time there's a rally for the next clerk who's going to end up going through the exact same thing, maybe next time Ted Cruz will win his physical confrontation with Mike Huckabee staffer Aaron Chang.
Who knows, maybe the next time this happens Maddow will describe it in a way that resembles what occurred.
This was the second time on her show that Maddow suggested a physical altercation had taken place, as can be seen in a longer clip I posted at YouTube.
Earlier in the segment Maddow showed the same footage and played a clip of Huckabee on Fox News saying he was "kind of surprised" when Cruz appeared, "even if it was at the last minute," but the program for the event was already settled and Cruz was more than welcome to meet with Davis. The Cruz campaign, contacted by the Maddow show, declined to comment, clearly recognizing the pointlessness of doing so. Here was Maddow's initial dubious claim --
So, two Republican presidential candidates, grown men who are not in junior high school, are nevertheless competing over who gets to jump onto the cause of a clerk in Kentucky who served time in jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. They are fighting over her physically!
While somehow managing to avoid physical contact!
Better example of junior high juvenilia -- Maddow breathlessly exaggerating the model civility of older students at odds as a brawl.
