This is like the "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out" of health care town hall viral videos. According to the videographer/blogger, a dozen teabaggers staked out Al Franken's booth at the Great Minnesota Get-Together ready to boo and hiss and shout "socialism!" and all of those things that they have been doing, everywhere.

But these are Minnesota teabaggers. They may be all ginned up with outrage, but these are people who've been conditioned for generations to listen politely to literally anyone talking to them. So, you know, Al Franken, who is actually a smart, wonky guy who loves talking about the specifics of policy, explains some stuff, and the teabaggers reveal concerns slightly more complex and reality-grounded than "DEATH PANELS HITLER," and everyone learns something.

Specifically everyone learns that reasoned debate is booooooooorrrrring. You will never ever see any of this clip on Fox, unless they can somehow edit it to make it look like Franken started crying or something.

[Via AMC, who is guest-hosting Maddow today barring the unexpected 4:30 pm death of Gabe Kaplan.]

To be sure: Sheila Jackson Lee represents inner-city Houston, Texas. Her district is 40% black and 36% Hispanic. (Jackson Lee's last Republican opponent, coincidentally, received 20% of the vote.) This woman questioning her has never and will never vote for Jackson Lee, and if her story of being an unemployed, divorcing cancer survivor without insurance is correct, she would be directly and immensely helped by any of the health care reform bills currently sitting in the House, whereas in our current American system, her lack of employment and her preexisting condition mean she is most likely fucked.

And this version of the video abruptly ends when the woman finishes her question, because Jackson Lee answered it by sort of explaining that fact.

But the health care argument is entirely, purely, 100% divorced from facts, reason, and logic. It is just fear, paranoia, and hatred. And murmuring on a phone (even if you're just calling the House health care hotline!) while a cancer survivor accuses you of wanting to kill her is just dumb.

She's been writing a secret book about him! Well, not just him. It's called The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama and it's about "emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power." And by "secret" I mean "to no one who read the AP story about it weeks before the McCain campaign approved Ifill as a moderator", and by "bold" they of course mean "actually the total opposite of" because that phrase is code for "emerging young African American politicians who somehow manage not to scare white people." One can only imagine Ifill, as the embodiment of PBS's quiet, sober, studiously inoffensive approach to covering the news, finds this topic personally interesting, because as a black woman she actually has to be significantly more boring than boring Washington establishment white guy pundits like Tom Brokaw or the late Tim Russert to prove that she does not have a chip on her shoulder or a loose cannon or anything remotely suggestive of an overly keen belief that slavery was wrong, and politicians can't be boring all the time. But whatever: now she's been exposed. Writing a book about a politician is practically the same as being on that politician's payroll, just ask Jerome Corsi.

Is the McCain campaign trying to turn the obvious "shoot the moderator" tactics it just pulled on Katie Couric into a full-blown strategy? If so, as Media Matters points out, it's got some holes, not least because recent years have seen debates moderated by the likes of Bob Schieffer, a close personal friend of George W. Bush whose brother was a business partner of Bush's before the Supreme Court voted him president. Also, Tom Brokaw loves John McCain. But at the end of the day, would either of those guys make Sarah Palin sound any readier to navigate the collapse of our banking system or any number of our fragile Middle Eastern frenemy states? Yeah: no.

[via Andrew Sullivan]

Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales is particularly harsh (and rightly so) on the moderators. "[Charlie] Gibson sat there peering down at the candidates over glasses perched on the end of his nose, looking prosecutorial and at times portraying himself as a spokesman for the working class." And: "The boyish Stephanopoulos, who has done wonders with the network's Sunday morning hour, 'This Week' (as, indeed, has Gibson with the nightly 'World News'), looked like an overly ambitious intern helping out at a subcommittee hearing, digging through notes for something smart-alecky and slimy." Zing!

George Stephanopoulos appeared on ABC's own Good Morning America today to smugly praise his ability to get Hillary to grudgingly say that Obama could beat McCain, while pointing out that the question was entirely pointless because there's no chance she's going to say "no."

The blog comment takeaway: Obama received a harsher grilling on more inane topics, and also ended up looking a bit better than Clinton.

Also a couple years from now we're going to get another round of those terrible "oh we are so ashamed of how we acted back then" pieces from the idiots who cover the campaign, just like we got after 2000 and 2004. Ugh.