With no detectable sense of irony or sarcasm, Salon's Alex Pareene comments:
Various right-wingers have been crowing about MSNBC’s ratings woes, with, for some reason, lots of conservatives piling on Chris Hayes, whose new weeknight prime-time show hasn’t been a runaway ratings success. (I have no clue why the right hates Hayes, especially considering that part of his whole deal is that he regularly asks conservatives to appear on his show and then engages with them civilly. He’s not O’Donnell!)
The answer to why the right hates Hayes is, of course, contained in Pareene's (feigned?) cluelessness. Hayes, unlike some of his MSNBC colleagues, does seem to enjoy civil debate with the ideological enemy, and generally he has the argumentative edge because whole troughs of facts are on his side and not the enemy's. He rattles them off like I could only my ABCs. It's really quite impressive, if one happens to agree with Hayes--and, I can imagine, quite infuriating, if one doesn't.
If Hayes is lucky he'll avoid catching the television "star" bug, a case of which O'Donnell has bad. I recall the day he contracted it. For months I had watched O'Donnell calmly, reasonably confronting pseudoconservatives on various MSNBC shows. Then one day, on "Hardball," I believe, there sat O'Donnell smirking his way through a Pat Buchanan argument until Boom!--O'Donnell lit into Buchanan with a volley of interrupting invectives that startled.
It seemed out of character. But perhaps O'Donnell--whom Pareene describes as "the insufferable smug self-satisfied liberal caricature everyone thinks all of MSNBC is"--was merely holding his badass self back, until groping for stardom. Just months later, he had his own show.