As I watched an agonizing minute or two of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell yesterday morning on "Meet the Press," my eyes glazed within seconds and within seconds more my brain slipped into a fog of inattentive paralysis. I heard little of anything McConnell had to say, because he was there to say precisely nothing, and his host, David Gregory, was content, relative to journalistic competence, to engage his guest's nothingness. (All last week we suffered through his NBC colleagues' compliments about his "masterful" job of working Newt Gingrich over, when in reality all Gregory did was to ask a question that Gingrich singularly botched.)
Their conversation had something to do with those dreadful deficits and that tediously expensive Medicare. I do remember that much. But it was that which caused my forgivable lapse into aforementioned glazes and fogs, for Gregory had failed to open the "interview" with the only pertinent question that any conscientious host would ever think to open with.
Host: Sen. McConnell, your party doesn't give a woodchuck's ass about deficits -- the ones your party mostly created, by the way -- except as a pretense to undermine and ultimately destroy this nation's federal safety nets. So it's about time someone here in Washington's journalism community asked the following questions, even though the audience already knows the answers -- in fact, that's rather the point today, to just nail down an understood basic or two. So Senator, I put it to you straightforwardly: Why persist in blathering about the horror of the debt, when in fact you love it, since it's your best excuse to fulfill your ideological dreams of a survival-of-the-fittest America? This so-called debt "debate," Senator, is actually all about your ideology -- not debt, or deficits, or Medicare, or anything other than the fulfillment of your ideology. Right?
McConnell: Why, Sir, I find your tone objectionable. We care very much about these hideous ...
Host: Stop it. Stop it right there, Senator. Cut the horseshit and confirm the obvious. Then we can move on. Or perhaps you'd like some background first? A bit of retrospective about Reagan's exploding deficits and the last Bush's hurling of our national debt into the stratosphere and Dick Cheney's brief lecture about meaningless deficits? You and yours sat and said nothing. But now with a Democrat in the White House you've a chance to pounce ideologically on your own debt, and from its "horrors" further create your nightmare of an ideological right-wing America.
McConnell: Why, Sir, that's a distortion of ...
Host: Hold it, Senator. That was merely the record. I know it. You know it. The audience knows it. And we're not going to sit here and discuss once again how you wish to save Medicare by destroying it, all because of these wretched deficits. You love both: both the destruction and wretchedness. Isn't that the whole point of your nihilistic ideology? Your side of the debate isn't about deficits, Senator, and it isn't about Medicare. It's fundamentally about the realization of your ideology. I'm not really asking, Senator. Because we both know the answer. I only want you to confirm what the audience already knows, or at any rate should know.
McConnell: Why, Sir, I again object. We care very much about ...
Host: Cut his mic. Get this idiot off the set ... Next we welcome to our political roundtable, Republican strategist Alex Castellanos. Now, my first, indeed my only question to you, Mr. Castellanos, is ...