because Keith will still have a damn good target to rail against. As our country sinks into the toilet and flushes away.
That's what I tell myself. But I still hope to death we don't have a McCain presidency.
But I'm thinking that, for Countdown anyway, a Hillary Clinton presidency would be worse.
Not only for ratings, as droves of former Dem fans of the show continued to drop off the viewer rolls because they could no longer stand the fact that now THEIR favorite politician would be subject to the same criticism as Bush.
But because it could send Keith into such a revival of "Big Show depression" that it would feel to him like 1998 all over again. And if THAT happens, it's the end of Countdown.
I paid a little visit to the pro-Hillary site that organized that stupid protest at 30 Rock on Friday. The one I wasn't really all that aware of, but which I now realize was essentially whipped up with the primary goal of getting Keith and Tweety fired. (The other goals, things like "ending sexism in the media" and somehow getting the Michigan and Florida primaries to be counted, were either too nebulous or not something NBC or MSNBC could really do anything about.) Of course, their little protest turned out to be a fizzle, but this isn't the end of it. They're planning on spamming lots of email inboxes this whole coming week, in their persistent efforts to get Keith and Tweety off the air. Why Keith? Because, according to the "Mad as Hell/Bitch" video that one of them made for YouTube and that the rest of them have been championing ever since, Keith is the worst sexist of all the many sexists at MSNBC. The one who deserves to be singled out as the worst of the worst.
Why? Don't ask me why. I can't figure out a damn thing he says in the whole video that qualifies as sexist. Neither can many other people. But there you have it.
I find myself realizing that if these people's chosen candidate somehow manages to come out of all the current nonsense with the nomination, I'm no longer so sure I can vote for her anymore. Not just because these fans got me so angry. But because SHE is getting me so angry. And if enough people end up thinking like me, and just staying home, it's welcome, President McCain.
But if enough people like me hold their noses and vote for her anyway, she might just become president.
And then what are we going to get? As Carl Bernstein said, a presidency run much like her campaign was.
Add on top of that a Republican base re-energized to attack her and her husband every which way they can, every step of the way.
It won't be pretty, I don't think. Even if it lasts but four years.
Keith is going to point out the lack of prettiness. He will feel that he has to, that it's his job. And each time he does, he's going to feel angry, he's going to feel depressed, he's going to cry.
And the rest of MSNBC is also going to feel a strange sense of deja vu.
If Countdown lasts under those circumstances, it's going to become "Countdown with Rachel Maddow."
Keith's going to try to find himself a tiny island in the Pacific where he can go to forget about all this. An island big enough to have a baseball diamond and a couple of teams who play each other regularly, to give him something to watch.
Of course, what happens if Obama emerges from all this intact? We'll have several months of decent Countdown as the Repugs throw every dirty trick at him they can. Then comes the election.
If McCain wins, we're in for four great years of Countdown viewing, at least until we all get drafted to fight one of his wars (and we will--they'll be so desperate for cannon fodder they'll take all of us) and we get greased by a poor Iranian kid defending himself.
If Obama wins, look for Keith's ratings to be the ones going into the crapper as scads of his former fans abandon him the first time Obama says or does something Keith doesn't like, and Keith does a Special Comment on it.
Pretty sad to know that for so many liberals/progressives/what have you, what the wingnuts said about them is right. They only love Keith when he is telling them what they want to hear. When he doses out the strong medicine, suddenly they hate him, he's a hack, he's terrible.
This picture from the protest illustrates it best:
As Paint It Black said on a DU thread about it, "No, he's still the same KO. Perspective is everything."
Righto. Keith IS "different," still. In fact, he's SO different that SHE can't handle it. When she first began listening to him, she was convinced he was "different" because he happened to be echoing HER viewpoints, which she wasn't used to hearing on TV. Problem is, she thought that was all he was ever going to do--echo HER viewpoints. Now he's not echoing them anymore, because he disagrees with her about some things her favorite candidate has done. And once he dared to express disappointment in Hillary Clinton, it didn't matter to her that he was doing it with regret and sorrow. To her, he was just another person who had proven himself not willing to echo her every sentiment. And with that, he was no longer "different"--he was just another one of those raging male TV sexists. *sigh*
I don't know. Maybe this whole campaign has just lasted too long for me, already. But I don't like what I'm seeing. And something tells me that unless we see a big change in people's attitudes and an opening of their minds, Keith's line of work is going to be a very, very difficult one to be in for the near future.
Keith, Randi Rhodes, Stephanie Miller...I really feel for them all, one way or another. They're trying to speak their truth, and in return they get attacked not only by those who completely oppose everything they politically believe in, but by people who share their basic beliefs...just because they dared to try to criticize a PERSON whom someone had idealized as the perfect embodiment of those beliefs.
Nobody's perfect, people. I prefer Obama, but he's got his flaws, and I hope he sees the light on them. So does Keith. I don't agree with everything he says or does on the show. But I've matured to the point where I don't either demand absolute perfection and idealism from people or toss them out the window as having "disappointed" me. It takes more than a mere lack of ideological perfection for me to give up on someone now. The bar has been set higher.
I wish others would set their bars higher too. It would be a much better and less polarized world.