Expertise is not the currency of television infotainment.
By Jacob Bacharach
Truthdig (5/3/19)
I cannot bring myself to hate Meghan McCain. What would be the point? She is the natural endpoint of a giddily vacuous celebrity culture, a sort-of famous person who plays a sort-of famous person on TV. She frequently says stupid and hateful things, but they always seem uncalculated, and she is endlessly surprised to find that people disagree with her. (One suspects that the household staff never did, and now that she’s wandered off the compound and into public life, she can’t quite seem to grasp that not everyone is a family retainer.) Like most privileged mediocrities, her sense of moral conviction is perfectly befuddled.
She has been known to pound the table and yell, “I’m John McCain’s daughter,” as though she were there for any other reason.
McCain is one of the hosts of the beloved kitchen background noise generator, “The View,” where she has been known to pound the table and yell, “I’m John McCain’s daughter,” as though she were there for any other reason. John McCain, you may recall, was a famously corrupt senator who reinvented himself as a “maverick” by very occasionally bucking his party’s line and by very frequently flattering reporters. Upon his death last year, he was hailed as a moral hero for having personally disliked Donald Trump. Meghan McCain also personally dislikes Trump and often compares him unfavorably to “my father, John McCain.”
Meghan’s natural audience
As is the case with all two dozen or so remaining “Never Trump” conservatives, Meghan’s natural audience is the national media. There is no other actual constituency for these beliefs. Anyone who rejects what Trump stands for must reject American conservativism as a whole, because he is its apotheosis: crude, atavistic, vengeful, unlettered, greedy, racist and mean. The “Never Trump” tendency just rejects the crudity, in principle ostensibly, but in reality simply for the practical reason that his transparency about the conservative political project constitutes a dangerous form of honesty.
Meghan McCain ostentatiously rejects the very prospect that “John McCain’s daughter” could be racist, although she is married to a man, Ben Domenech, whose also-ran conservative content farm literally aggregated stories into a “black crime” vertical. …
- Seth Meyers Calmly Dismantles Meghan McCain Over Her Attacks On Muslim Congresswoman — NBC’s Seth Meyers grilled a squirming Meghan McCain over her ongoing attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) — and the “View” co-host didn’t like it. McCain linked Omar’s remarks to the Chabad of Poway synagogue shooting in San Diego, during an appearance on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and Meyers called out her comments as irresponsible given the violent threats faced by the Muslim congresswoman. … Link to Story and 3-Minute Video
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Meghan McCain’s Husband Unleashes Unhinged Crude Homophobic Rant On Seth Meyers — On Wednesday, The Daily Beast documented a long string of inflammatory tweets, since deleted, by Ben Domenech, husband of Meghan McCain and founder of the conservative website The Federalist. Domenech went after comedian Seth Meyers, who criticized McCain’s comments on “The View” attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as “dangerous” during an interview on NBC’s “Late Night” on Tuesday. “I see that @sethmeyers, the untalented piece of shit who only has has job because he regularly gargled Lorne Michaels’ balls, went after my wife tonight with his idiotic anti-Semitic bullshit,” wrote Domenech. … Read the Rest
(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2019. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www,thecommonercall.org )