In this post-debate interview, CNN’s Dana Bash tells Bush he seems frustrated. (Never a good question to get …) Frustrated? I’m not frustrated. Not frustrated. Then he goes on to list the reasons he’s frustrated.
RNC Chair Reince Priebus, who partnered with CNBC to put on this debate, is crapping on CNBC big time for putting on a terrible debate. I thought it was a terrible debate. But I was a little unclear why Priebus thought it was so terrible from a GOP perspective. That became a little more clear after I saw the breakdown of how much each candidate got to talk. Carly Fiorina, who is barely in the running, got more time than anyone else. Jeb Bush got the least by a significant margin – less than Rand Paul, Huckabee, Christie, people who aren’t even really in the race. Priebus is clearly getting hell for that.
In the early days of Obamacare, conservatives howled at the prospect that new customers would get to register to vote when they enrolled in the program. It was going to be like another ACORN, god forbid.
Remember that story about how a private detective working for Sen. David Vitter got caught recording a high-powered GOP sheriff and his political pals talking shop at a local diner a few days ago? The Sheriff of Jefferson Parish, Newell Normand, caught seemingly hapless gumshoe Robert J. Frenzel red-handed. Frenzel jammed out of the diner. Normand and his pals chased after him. Then Normand called in a few of his Sheriff’s Deputies who finally apprehended Frenzel cowering under an AC unit. Well, guess what? The story just got a lot weirder. Yes, really!
Turns out among those shooting the shit with Normand in the diner was John Cummings, a major donor to Democrat John Bel Edwards, Vitter’s opponent in the Governor’s race. Cummings, for some reason was identified as the “man with the white beard”, was allegedly the guy Frenzel was there to record. But aha! … also there was another private investigator named Danny DeNoux. And he just happens to be the guy who discovered a woman named Wendy Ellis, a prostitute who claims Vitter was her client. She has resurfaced in recent weeks with new claims that she became pregnant with Vitter’s child and refused his demands that she abort the pregnancy. These allegations have turned up in the blog of a local named Jason Berry. DeNoux says it was a wealthy businessman who hired him to dig up dirt on Vitter. But he won’t say who it is other than it’s not Cummings – the “man with the white beard.”
In other words, the story is turning out to be rather awesome and a genuine mystery that the local press seems likely to spend the next several weeks trying to unravel. Catherine Thompson has the latest developments here.
Despite all our disagreements and polarization in this country, all seem to agree that the CNBC debate was a disaster. What’s notable though is that no one seems to agree why it was so bad. Indeed, the key attacks and critiques are actually mutually contradictory. Lots of people, myself included, were surprised that most of the debate moderators, besides John Harwood, seemed so poorly prepared. Betsy Quick had Trump dead to rights on her Mark Zuckerberg question but was so poorly prepared that when Trump flatly denied her accurate claim she could only respond, “So where did I read this and come up with this …” On top of that, CNBC gave a lot of time to pet network ranters like Santelli and Cramer. In other words, one critique was that the questions tended toward the obscure and they let the candidates off too easy. But Republicans are now in open revolt because of media bias.
Just nothing better than rightwing pundits deciding whether Carson or Obama is “more authentically African-American.”
As you see, the RNC has now expelled NBC News from the Republican debate schedule, charging them – in full and calculated hyperventilation – with conducting the debate in “bad faith.”
If I don’t say so myself, I think my comparison to the Boehner drama was more prescient than I realized. There has to be someone betraying them or some new outrage to feed the machine. With Obama fading into history, with the ‘establishment’s’ candidate vanquished, now it’s NBC News. You get a sense of where this is going that Ted Cruz says that Limbaugh or Hannity should moderate the debates. To be clear, this isn’t about whether the debate was good or bad or whether axing NBC is fair or not. (I said the debate was a mess while it was happening.) In the grandest sense, who cares? It’s just that the entire drama and whine-a-thon is ridiculous. This is their new big issue? Like I said, the outrage needs a target. Who’s betraying them now. The pattern takes over everything.
I’d ask what RNC Chair Reince Priebus is talking about when he says “we were betrayed” by CNBC. But really, I doubt he actually believes this stuff. But base Republicans have been whipped up into a stir. So he has to feed the outrage monster. Think about it, talking about a news network: “We were betrayed.” They’re actually going public with this histrionic nonsense. Amazing.
As the epic, historic post-debate drama unfolded and RNC Chair Reince Priebus wrote NBC out of the RNC book of life/debates last week, one of our readers made a pretty obvious point. If this were a matter of the President or the White House or Congress or the Democrats axing Fox News, not only would there be a chorus of whining from Fox (understandable enough) but all the other networks would almost certainly be coming together to support Fox on free press grounds.