In my Sunday morning haste to land on a credible news network, only by accidental surfing did I see Josh Hawley splattered on the TV screen. His was a brief appearance on ABC's "This Week," a top-of-the-hour teaser to open the show: The president-elect deserves the cabinet members he wants, said the senator.
Instant was the stench of cynical pretense, in that Hawley did more than just utter the words. He cast them in the form of a noble, universal principle, i.e., every president deserves the cabinet members he wants — not just Donald Trump. The ultrapartisan's feigned nobility and con artistry of fair play stank up the room.
Before posting I re-checked history to make doubly sure I wasn't slandering Jackrabbit Josh, the fist-pumping senator from Trumpy Missouri, my birth state of Trumanesque integrity and now a Mississippi doppelgänger moved north. Was he as noble and principled in 2021? Did he believe that that year's president deserved the cabinet members he wanted?
Not quite. Hawley voted Nay on 19 of Joe Biden's 21 cabinet and cabinet-level nominations — against a Democrat, a 90% kill rate. But let's cut him some slack. An Evangelical Presbyterian U.S. senator of God-blessed-neofascistic Republicanism couldn't possibly vote Yea on every nominee proposed by a radical-leftist-Marxist president in servile bondage to Roman popery.
They're rather remarkable, these Sunday shows, what with their usual suspects and standard humbuggery. I began this post by noting that my returning (and one-off) Sunday adventure was inadvertent; I sort of splashed into it while surfing my way to the BBC. Yet once at ABC, I decided to dive in for the hour.
Hawley had hooked me. His preposterous comment on the evenhanded treatment of presidential nominations was merely the opening teaser. And yet, with only these few seconds of airtime in mind, on the record and as a Sunday morning template, one could write a fair-sized book on the unchallenged absurdities of these shows and the pols who appear on them.
I don't single out the Missourian. The show's special guest was another Republican b.s.-peddler and senatorial colleague of Hawley's, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee. Several times he said Trump had scored a huge and magnificent mandate from the American people — I'm paraphrasing — so now they want him to move expeditiously on all fronts, and to give no quarter.
And his rhetorical hustling was sheer nonsense. Trump's 1.6% advantage in the popular vote was a squeak, not a roar; a slim victory, not a sweeping decree of carte blanche. I should probably mention about now that "This Week" did have a host, a person sufficiently informed, one assumes, to guide the discussion back from any errant journeys into propagandistic falderal, such as Hagerty's. But host Jonathan Karl just sat there as the Tennessean yakked on about the nonexistent mandate.
At times Karl did add some peculiarities of his own, the most conspicuous of which was his statement that Pam Bondi is "obviously qualified" to be attorney general of the United States. With that, the host dismissed her Trumpian agreement on the "stolen" 2020 election as dispositive evidence of either stupidity or skulduggery. Both should disqualify her as head of the DOJ or any high-ranking job, for that matter, other than RNC chairwomen.
Finally, not one remark of originality or daring unconventionality was articulated throughout the hour. That I suppose is a feature inherent to such programming — especially anything audacious. In mediocrity there is safety. And originality? Even assuming its potential, it would only get in the way of one's talking points.
After sitting through every one of this Sunday show's 60 minutes, it turned out that Josh Hawley's absent B-roll appearance and triple-A insincerity, delivered in a flash, were the most interesting of them all.
I'll say this much for the other senator, the host and the panel's usual suspects and standard humbuggery. Rather than giving us another stint at American politics' cornucopia of crazy, they were refreshingly monotonous in that old-school tradition of Sunday public affairs programming. (Do people really watch this stuff every week?)
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