Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Let's Take A Closer Look At The 2WAY Morning Meeting

Yesterday's 2WAY Morning Meeting show is an example of the current media dilemma. Let's start out by recognizing that the three co-hosts are simply unlikely: Mark Halperin is in the middle of a long-march rehabilitation campaign to come back from 2017 sexual harassment allegations:

According to a May 3, 2019 report in The Daily Beast, Halperin worked on repairing his reputation during the first quarter of 2019 with a goal of returning as a pundit on television and radio. According to the article, Halperin enlisted the help of Michael Smerconish, Mika Brzezinski, and Joe Scarborough on an under-the-radar yet calculated professional rehabilitation campaign.

According to the link, more than a dozen women came forward alleging that for a 20-year period, Halperin had groped them and otherwise had unwanted bodily contact, and as a result,

On October 30, 2017, both NBC and MSNBC terminated Halperin's contract with the networks. On January 3, 2018, Showtime replaced Halperin on The Circus with then-CBS News anchor Alex Wagner.

Sean Spicer, as i've already noted, had been a "professional Republican" for years before joining the first Trump administration as Trump's first press secretary. Within six months, Trump had recognized that professional Republicans weren't what he needed, and both Spicer and Reince Priebus were edged out.

Dan Turrentine had been an also-ran professional Democrat who worked for Hillary Clinton and Jared Polis, but he mostly just has an exaggerated permanent nervous-guy grin as he utters standard Democrat talking points, as we see in the example below, which begins at 12:41 in the video embedded at the top of this post:

Halperin: I'd just like one short thought from each of you on whether this is a serious thing that the president will see through and to what extent this is some bullshit 72-hour I'm-for-law-enforcement-against-a-black-run city political ploy. Dan?

Turrentine: You said it better than I could. The latter. Hahahaha!

Halperin: Sean, is this real>

Spicer: It's absolutely real. I mean, this is all stuff that has bothered him since the first term. . .

I don't think any of these guys understands what Trump has in mind with the DC crime-and-homeless issue -- heck, I covered it better here last week. Spicer goes on after the exchange above to display his basic obtuseness at 13:50:

I will say this, in the spirit of looking forward. . . this is the opportunity for Republicans. DC was created in 1789 as a perfect square, 10 miles by 10. It was supposed to be a federal district, so that no state would have a stake in it, part of it from Maryland, part of it from Virginia. In 1846, they gave back the Virginia piece, which is now Alexandria and Arlingnton. The real solve for DC is give back everything but the National Mall from the White House to the Supreme Court, create a new federal district, and give the rest back to Maryland.

The problem is that this is exactly what Trump doesn't have in mind, which is just another indication of why Spicer went back to being just a professional Republican after six unsatisfactory months in the White House. If most of DC is given back to Maryland, that just takes its voter base and gives it to the same Baltimore urban machine that runs the state now, which changes exactly nothing. If you redefine Washington as just a narrow strip of monuments and museums where almost nobody lives, you just redefine the problem out of existence, although you make Maryland even worse.

As I said in last week's post,

But the problem of Washington, which simply can't be ignored, is the overall problem of the 1960s Civil Rights movement writ small. . . . Here we are 50 and 60 years later, and with almost every issue connected to the African-American community, we see the implicit questions: "Emmett Till died for this?" "Martin Luther King Jr marched for this?" It looks like Trump, who is gradually getting to be acknowledged as one of the most consequential presidents, is going to take this problem on[.]

Trump doesn't want to redefine the problem, he wants to fix it at the root. He singled out one of the causes in yesteday's press conference:

Trump announced on Monday that he will be working to revoke no-cash bail in cities across the country, coming as Trump has honed in on cracking down on crime in the nation’s capital.

"This dire public safety crisis stems directly from the abject failures of the city’s local leadership. The radical left city council adopted no cash bail," Trump said, noting cities that have adopted such policies like Chicago and New York City. "Somebody murders somebody, and they’re out on no cash bail before the day is out."

"But we're going to change no cash bail. We're going to change the statute and get rid of some of the other things, and we'll count on the Republicans in Congress and Senate to vote. We have the majority, so we'll vote."

You can't fix Washington unless you fix the urban machines that have created the problems that are also in New York and Chicago. As I notd n last week's post, Trump delegates to highly visible point figures to take on his major agenda items, like Tom Homan with the border or Pete Hegseth with the Defense Department. In the case of Washington and the urban machines generally, it's Jeanine Pirro: On one hand, Mark Halperin is savvy enough to recognize that the public isn't satisfied with the prepackaged legacy media consensus. On the other, what he offers only pretends to be different. Dan Turrentine at the end of the day is a smug conventional Democrat, offering the same old talking points and cackling with laughter at it. Sean Spicer is a nice guy, I guess, good looking, but he just isn't terribly bright, and he doesn't understand Trump, who is a genius.

So far, after six years of his rehabilitaion tour, Halperin has managed to get himself in with Megyn Kelly, herself a has-been. Anyhow, not much for even Halperin to grope there, if you ask me. She's safe.

posted by test @ August 12, 2025   0 Comments