Bizarro World: The Debate Showed Us the Real “Liberal Media Bias” — for Donald Trump
Specifically, it was the alleged liberal cable network MSNBC and its team of wise men, Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough, Brian Williams and Chris Matthews, who couldn’t wait to tap into the “Trump comeback” narrative by praising Trump for a performance that the rest of us observed as the creepiest, most sniffle-punctuated and, in places, Third World presidential debate appearance in at least a century.
I hasten to note that not all of the MSNBC panelists were so infuriatingly forgiving. To the contrary, Lawrence O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, Eugene Robinson and, yes, Republican strategists Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt were the exceptions — nailing Trump’s twitchy, seemingly coked-up “jumble of sniffles and nonsense,” as John Oliver described it last week. But among the network’s self-styled “grown-ups,” including the “Morning Joe” panel the next day, the reaction was basically that Trump was not as stupid and offensive as during the first debate, and therefore he won.
This bears repeating: The liberal network, the network that’s routinely mischaracterized as being populated with left-wing apparatchiks, declared Trump to be the narrow winner simply because he wasn’t as horrendously buffoonish as during his first go-round. Joe Scarborough, for example, whom Trump has blasted for being a loser and a clown, said that it was the Republican nominee’s “most effective debate performance so far” and “he dominated the second debate in the same way she dominated the first debate.”
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