Howard screened his movie before a Washington DC audience, then he and writer Peter Morgan and respected journalist James Reston, Jr. had a little panel discussion. And Howard, who voted for Nixon, said he was sad that America was all "never again" about Nixon and then Bush happened. And all the panelists compared Bush to Nixon and then Chris Wallace stood up and schooled them. (Or, as James Pinketon puts it, "FOX News’ Chris Wallace threw a fair-and-balanced apple of discord into the middle of the festivities.")

"Richard Nixon's crimes were committed purely in the interest of his own political gain," Mr. Wallace told Mr. Howard before an audience of a few hundred after viewing the filmmakers new film "Frost/Nixon," which is about the only U.S. president to resign from office.

"I think to compare what Nixon did, and the abuses of power for pure political self preservation, to George W. Bush trying to protect this country — even if you disagree with rendition or waterboarding — it seems to me is both a gross misreading of history both then and now," Mr. Wallace said.

And!

"Yeah I respectfully would like to disagree with that," Mr. Wallace said. "It trivializes Nixon's crimes and completely misrepresents what George W. Bush did. Whatever George W. Bush did was after the savage attack of 9/11, in which 3,000 Americans were killed, and was done in service of trying to protect this country. I'm not saying that you have to agree with everything he did, but it was all done in the service of trying to protect this country and keep us safe."

"And the fact is that we sit here so comfortably, and the country has not been attacked again since 9/11," Mr. Wallace said.

Chris is right, of course. Bush is no Nixon. Nixon was a smart paranoid criminal lunatic who actually effectively managed the nation even as he abused the office for his personal gain, railed against Jews, and illegally bombed Cambodia. Bush, of course, is a messianic moron who ran the nation into the ground, allowed a great American city to be washed away, and lied us into a pointless, poorly planned foreign war because he was so stupidly convinced of his own essential goodness and infallibility.

But, you know, Chris is less right to dismiss Bush's various crimes as borne out of a desire to do good and protect the nation (and do good intentions actually make a difference when you're violating the fucking constitution from the office of the presidency, Chris? really?), as opposed to Nixon's supposedly less pure motives. What the hell was the illegal dismissal of seven US Attorneys for partisan political reasons? That was for the security of the nation?

Giving Karl Rove, architect of the permanent Republican majority plan, a policy position certainly smacks of "pure political self-preservation." The Valerie Plame thing?

Also, yes, Chris, motivation aside, making torture official United States policy is actually worse than a two-bit burglary. Asshole.

How the hell does Mike Wallace even talk to his miserable son?

Wolff wrote a biography of Fox owner and tyrant Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch has cozied up a bit to Barack Obama and has been focusing, lately, on turning the Wall Street Journal into a serious competitor of the New York Times. So Fox's cartoonish liberal-bashing is a bit embarrassing to him, according to the book.

“It is not just Murdoch (and everybody else at News Corp.’s highest levels) who absolutely despises Bill O’Reilly, the bullying, mean-spirited, and hugely successful evening commentator,” Wolff wrote, “but [Fox News chief executive] Roger Ailes himself who loathes him. Success, however, has cemented everyone to each other."

“The embarrassment can no longer be missed,” Wolff wrote, in another section of the book. “He mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”

It's all because Murdoch's wife and children are limousine liberals now, and in this new Obama era, we are all out-of-touch cultural elites, aren't we? But O'Reilly, and Fox, still make money, so Murdoch will not be changing anything about them until they stop making money. He is a capitalist, not an ideologue.

Oh, but what was that about Chris Matthews? He is going to run for the Senate! Against maybe Arlen Specter, the ancient Republican?

FiveThirtyEight has been hearing for some time that Matthews is serious about running for the United States Senate, but it took a trip to Georgia among the Georgia-runoff-congregated and well-connected Obama organizer throng to confirm.

According to multiple sources, who confirmed the Tip O'Neill staffer-cum-MSNBC host has negotiated with veteran Obama staffers to enlist in his campaign, Chris Matthews is likely to run for United States Senate in Pennsylvania in 2010. Matthews, 62, would run as a Democrat. Arlen Specter, the aging Republican incumbent, will be 80 if he chooses to run for re-election.

It is Chris' life-long dream to be a Senator, and that is a sad dream, but still. If Specter retires, and his health suggests he might, the Democrats would be fools to hand an easy Democratic seat pickup to a liberal broadcaster with a long history of ignorant sexist comments, but, you know, they're the Democratic Party. They nominated Al Franken to run in Minnesota, didn't they?

Presumably Hannity fill the extra airtime shouting at invited guests and interviewing more Jew-fearing sources for his "investigations" into Barack Obama and other secret Muslims.

Though the idea of left-right balanced opinion shows has become passe (thanks in part to Jon Stewart's reaming of Crossfire), Fox News might have been better off going the other way. It can be fun to watch Hannity take it on the chin, as happened all too rarely on Hannity and Colmes. One exception was the clip above, in which Colmes slams Hannity over his double standard on marital affairs; below, Obama aide Robert Gibbs hounds Hannity over an anti-Semitic source.

Poor Keith was the voice of liberal America for a moment; now, he seems old and strident. Largely thanks to unflattering comparisons to Maddow—even though it was Keith who urged MSNBC to give her a show! Now everybody talks about Maddow, and it seems like forever since people gave Olbermann serious attention. He's been definitively upstaged, for the moment.

But like we said, the Maddow backlash will come. It always does. Early fans will drop her now that she's popular, like hipsters giving up on bands. Her mistakes will draw more attention. Slate will run some piece about how terrible she is, per its contrarian mission statement. And the pendulum will swing back towards Keith for a while, before some time passes and both of them settle into "plain old liberal TV host" territory in the public mind.

That's assuming that Olbermann doesn't fly into some jealous rage prematurely and say something snide about her, which would only serve to increase her popular period an make him an unsympathetic figure once viewers grow bored and go looking for an alternative. Just bide your time quietly, Keith; the internet which Maddow loves so much does not love anybody for an extended period of time.

Although this will probably keep her neck deep in public sympathy for months:

What only those close to her know is that she has suffered from cyclical depression since puberty that, she says, you can set your watch by. At her lowest points, she loses her sense of smell: "It's a warning sign that like, 'Oh, I'm not going to be able to live with myself for the next 48 hours'. It's weird."

Keith Olbermann became the voice of Bush's second term. After eking out a narrow victory and calling it a mandate, the President really outdid himself. The war went to hell, the lies that got us into the war were further aired out, the details of his various unconstitutional surveillance programs came to light, the ideological disdain for effective governance and the bubble of true believers led to the Katrina disaster, and America basically got a serious case of buyers' remorse. One guy on TV sounded as perpetually pissed off and outraged as you did, from 2003 onward: Keith Olbermann!

His newfound glee at casting moral judgment on the mendacity of the lunatics in charge was, you know, refreshing after a couple years of the newsmedia wandering in the post-9/11 desert of breathless Bush-worship. Everyone felt kinda bad for selling that stupid and pointless war, but no one quite wanted to be the first to go whole-hog anti-authority. But Olbermann's voice of the opposition was the best thing on TV, leading right up to the 2006 midterms, when America first wholly rejected the Republican party.

But now we've just had an election about Hope and Change, and the new guy in charge is not a fire-breathing pissed-off Howard Dean, but a calm and cool unifier promising to bring dispassionate rationality back to the White House. Meanwhile at MSNBC, Olbermann's charming protege is a Rhodes Scholar who's specifically pledged never to have more than one guest on at a time, because shouting and argument and cross-talk don't actually advance the discussion. Rachel Maddow's ratings are phenomenal, and every month there's a new fawning profile of her showcasing how... normal (and nice!) she is.

If Olbermann was the voice of the opposition, Maddow is the voice of the new liberals in charge. It won't necessarily diminish Olbermann's popularity and influence (or even his ratings), but he's not on top of the zeitgeist anymore. Let's pray for a great 2012 race to get him across that next contract renegotiation hump. Gingrich/Palin '12!

CNN has a device that renders three-dimensional holographic images of the network's far-flung contributors in the channel's New York studio.

Anderson Cooper should have a ball with that. No teasing poor holographic Candy Crowley, Anderson. She's tired enough as it is.

CNN's competitors have to content themselves with mid-1990s videogame technology:

General Electric's NBC has two new "virtual-reality studios" where anchors will update animated maps. NBC and MSNBC will feature a running electoral count projected on the side of the networks' headquarters in Rockefeller Plaza. News Corp.'s Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network and the Fox broadcast network will use a new virtual-reality studio to provide graphics and polling data. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

It's a good thing the TV people are sexing up this election with magical effects. Because otherwise it would be such a snoozer!

So far, Cramer's been "pilloried" more for the calls that he definitively got wrong, and for being a huge bull in general right up until the bottom fell out of the market. The reaction to his "pull your money out" rant was more slack-jawed amazement at how he could totally flip his entire investment philosophy without blinking. And, you know, at how he was about to cry. He may turn out to be right! We'll see in five years. I guess you can't expect him to know what the public thinks:

For his own part, Cramer insisted he ignores his legion of skeptics and haters. "I have not seen any of the Fox ads," he said. "You know why? For the same reason that I haven't read a blog about me in years; I haven't read an article about me in years. Because you know what? I gotta do my job."

Limbaugh wrote in an email (Did they take away his radio show yet?), "Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race. OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I'll let you know what I come up with."

As for Powell's concern that a McCain presidency would result in two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, Limbaugh wrote: "I was also unaware of his dislike for John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia. I guess he also regrets Reagan and Bush making him a four-star [general] and secretary of state and appointing his son to head the FCC. Yes, let's hear it for transformational figures." [Politico]

Last night, Andrea Mitchell tentatively tried to claim, once again, that McCain won "on points," everyone agreed that McCain was feistier and got better zingers in, everyone fixated on the "I'm not George Bush" line as the best of the debates, Joe the Plumber was supposed to be the story of the day, and overall everyone wanted a narrative shift to a McCain comeback, because that's a better story.

But the voters didn't care.

CBS undecideds: Obama 53, McCain 22. CNN poll: Obama 58, McCain 31. MediaCurves independents: Obama 60, McCain 30. John King tried to explain away his own poll's bias toward Democrats even as the independents they polled when for Obama by 26 points.

This is bad news for pundits! Because one very important role a pundit is supposed to play is recognizing and explaining the mood of the nation. They are supposed to predict, based on their experience and wisdom, what voters want to hear and what they will respond to. And this season, they've been dead fucking wrong, over and over again. But more importantly, the numbers are proving them wrong objectively, and they're forced to correct themselves immediately.

In previous election cycles, the numbers could say it was a narrow Gore victory or statistical tie, but the punditry could shift those numbers over a weekend through relentless repetition of the narrative they invented, making it a lopsided Bush gain by Monday. It's much, much harder for Maureen Dowd to control—or even reflect—the "narrative" of the campaign now, because the internet makes all the raw data available and everyone has access to it.

We never intend to write a "hooray the internet is correcting and democratizing the MSM" piece but in this instance it does seem to be a useful corrective to the tendency of people like Chris Matthews to mistake their own fevered imaginations for the mood of a nation.

• August, 2007: God damn Bernanke! Alan Greenspan! They have no idea how bad things are. No idea! (Wild rage).
• September, 2007: "The only thing I have is my authenticity."
• January, 2008: Cramer predicts Mike Bloomberg might buy the New York Times. Not yet!
• January, 2008: Cramer bet that financial stocks would outperform other sectors in 07. Lost bet.
• February, 2008: Barron's points out that Cramer's stock picks suck, factually speaking. Barron's reporters are banned from CNBC.
• March, 2008: Cramer nearly cries on TV because he was surprised Eliot Spitzer likes sex so much.
• March, 2008: Cramer tries to save Bear Stearns. Turns out he's not that influential.
• September, 2008: Jim Cramer was totally right in his initial crazy rant against Bernanke! Unfortunately he screamed so many things subsequently that everyone had forgotten about it by the time the markets crashed.
• October, 2008: But um, Cramer also recommended Wachovia stock as a "safe haven" for investors. That was very, very wrong.
• October, 2008: He got so upset he said fuck it, just put all your money under the mattress!
• October, 2008: Okay, back to normal!

New video above, old video below:

One knowledgeable source told us: "Shareholders were calling up NBC and GE - a lot, maybe thousands. They were saying, 'What the [bleep] is wrong with these guys?' . . . Chris Matthews just got stuck in the middle of it all."

Supposedly GE chairman Jeff Immelt got involved, presumably in the decision to replace Olbermann and Matthews with David Gregory. NBC denies this, but Immelt personally decided to let go of shock jock/bigot Don Imus that last time Imus acted like a racist tool on NBC's dime, so maybe there's some truth in the idea.

There's an alternate theory: Olbermann and Matthews were pushed aside simply because their squabbling was an obvious mess, but NBC chief Jeff Zucker invented the story about shareholder pressure to link the name of Jeff Immelt — rather than his own — to the MSNBC mess.

The Post never comes out and says Matthews is on his way out at MSNBC, but one has to wonder about his future there, and about what his next move might be. CNN? ABC? Start an angry ex-anchors network with Dan Rather? Beg a slot on Ana Marie Cox's YouTube thing? Anything is possible!

Whatever happens, Fox will continue to obnoxiously gloat about all the liberals' misfortune, as the network did yesterday:

[Post]

In interviews, 10 current and former staff members said that long-simmering tensions between MSNBC and NBC reached a boiling point during the conventions. “MSNBC is behaving like a heroin addict,” one senior staff member observed. “They’re living from fix to fix and swearing they’ll go into rehab the next week.”

...According to three staff members, Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal, and Steve Capus, president of NBC News, considered flying to the Republican convention in Minnesota last week to address the lingering tensions.

Olbermann, by the way, told the Washington Post he never really wanted to be an anchor in the first place:

"Phil and I have debated this set-up since late winter/early spring (with me saying, 'Are you sure this flies?' and him saying, 'Yes, but let's judge it event by event') and I think we both reached the same point during the RNC," Olbermann said by e-mail.

[Times, Washington Post]

The sudden death this summer of NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, who made frequent appearances on MSNBC, removed a political and temperamental rudder for the network. Mr. Griffin has tried to fill the power vacuum since, struggling to shepherd the network's big personalities through a period of transition.

"Struggling" is putting it mildly. The Democratic convention should be a crowning moment for the resurgent cable news network, which has otherwise been an also-ran since its founding 12 years ago. A little sparring would be one thing; conflict can goose ratings, even when it's wantonly self-indulgent.

But this is just a mess. Host Chris Matthews has oscillated wildly between cranky scolding of his coworkers and obsequious near-groveling to the Hillary Clinton supporters who detest him. Both of Joe Scarborough's high-profile rants were too long and tiresome to add spice. And half of what Olbermann says seems to end up on microphone accidentally. Now even shiny new anchor Rahel Maddow is being drawn into the muck (Jossip reports some staff demand she be more of an Olbermann partisan).

MSNBC needs more yelling (at misbehaving anchors) off the air and less yelling on it. Unless this fighting sends ratings through the roof. In that case, by all means, continue.

(Disclaimer: The man in the lower right corner of the graphic is NOT and should NOT be confused with an MSNBC anchor. He is instead House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and thus at a total loss to understand the horrific partisan bickering and vicious palace intrigue going on around him. Any suggestion that Rep. Hoyer is an MSNBC anchor or otherwise emotionally unstable or sociopathically antisocial is unintentional and accidental. In fact, Gawker apologizes, in advance, for not blurring his photo or something.)

No you did not, unless you are Media Matters! On Monday, Rush said that Obama "believes it is proper to kill a baby that has survived an abortion," which is a lie they say but who cares. And, uh, yesterday Rush said this:

It's — you know, it's just — it's just we can't hit the girl. I don't care how far feminism's saying, you can't hit the girl, and you can't — you can't criticize the little black man-child

Do you need more context? No, you do not, because the formerly drug-addled host was just rambling, which is his job. It's nice work if you can get it!

Rush just signed that huge new deal, sure, and his audience is still scary and enormous, yes, but honestly? We insular New York-types don't listen to the radio because few of us commute anywhere, and if we did listen to the radio we would listen to something gay and elitist like "Car Talk" so the coastal liberals don't really understand that a) Rush's audience is still huge and "mainstream" enough to make calling him "irrelevant" premature and b) his audience generally "gets it." Sort of, at least. We all have crazy angry grandfathers who don't "get it," but for the most part it's just bitter white dudes who get their giggles from someone on the radio saying something borderline offensive, snicker snicker. Whatever, let them have their fun, and their guns, because that is all they will have in The New Economy, after the Mexicans ship their jobs to Hollyweird.

As soon as Omarosa came out, she was offended (no idea why). Then Wendy Williams tried to take Omarosa's book to show the audience, and Omarosa snatched it back (no idea why). Then, despite the best efforts of Wendy to be reasonable, the sniping continued throughout the interview, like so:

W: And you are rich. That is what you said on the BET red carpet.

O: And I represent my community well. I give back more to my community than anyone that I know. So if that’s being ABW, you are reinforcing stereotypes. That’s important for you not to do. Cause you don’t know. You really don’t.

W: Listen, you’re not my type Omarosa, and let me tell you…

O: Trust me.

W: Twenty two years I’ve been doing what I’m doing…

O: But don’t be fake. Because what happens is you have guests on your show and then you go on your radio show and talk smack instead of doing it when they are sitting on the couch.

W: I’m doing it right here.

O: I don’t have to be your type, but let me be clear. Been there, done that.

Here's the video, which is fairly entertaining. If Williams can just get Dick Cheney and some sort of convicted killer to come on next, her reputation will be restored!

[TVNewser]

1. There is no "horn" attached to O'Reilly. The illustration includes little dialog bubbles, like in comic books, with pointy parts of the bubbles aimed at O'Reilly's mouth. Maybe the host missed that when his producer or whoever briefed him on his outrage during a break.

2. The illustration is by no stretch a caricature, defined by Merriam-Webster as "exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics." It is a series of straightforward renderings of O'Reilly as he looks on camera. A variety of unnatural colors are used, but not in the service of exaggerating anything about O'Reilly or making him look bad.

O'Reilly's ginned up outrage comes from Roger Ailes' mudslinging, dirty-politics playbook. The idea is to attack the critic, as the network did with our own Hamilton Nolan yesterday and as it has been doing with journalists and other targets for years now. But some of O'Reilly's emotion may very well be real: emerging evidence, as reported by Arango and Steinberg, that this old routine is getting boring and driving away viewers is apparently causing some very real panic over at Fox.

[TVNewser]

(Ward Sutton illustration via Times)

Stephen found Jesus in the autumn of 2001, if you catch my meaning, and was converted by his Brazilian housekeeper. It really seems like if you're yelling "Oh, Jesus" with a Brazilian housekeeper, it should be for a better reason.

Not long after his conversion, Stephen started to rebuild his career through appearances as the shouty Christian on celebrity reality shows like Celebrity Mole Hawaii, Celebrity Mole Yucatan, and Ty Murray's Celebrity Bull Riding Challenge. Finally making his way onto Celebrity Apprentice, where he managed to talk about his faith constantly while stabing other competitors in the back.

Stephen's wackjob political notions include telling Bono "You would do far more good if you just preached the gospel of Jesus rather than trying to get rid of Third World debt relief." He also said, "I think what America needs more than anything is a leader who's honest, who's truly a man of faith, and who allows that faith to make his decisions with his common good sense," when he endorsed Sen. Sam Brownback for President. Clearly, this man is the heart of America's conservative movement.

[via Radar]

So Meltdown's 20 seeds were all pretty impressive:

Lara Croft / Batman / Gandolf [sic]/ Enid (Ghostworld) / Aquaman / Captain America / Pikachu / Wolverine / Iron Man / Alan Quartermine / Superman / Alien Queen (Aliens) / Terminator / Voltron / Wonder Woman / Darth Vader / Hulk / Spiderman / Thing / Star Buck (Battle Star G) / The Father from the Movie Happiness / The Borg / Thor / Jason Vorhees / Bionic Woman / Cloverfield Monster / Predator / Chewbaca / Snake Eyes (GI Joe) / Mr. Myagi / Freddy Krueger / Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin

Aside from the spelling issues (maybe they're used to spelling Gandalf's name in Tengwar), the big failure is not specifying Original Universe Starbuck or Re-imagined Universe Starbuck. Alan Quartermain, Enid Coleslaw, and The Father from Happiness are all classy choices, but the G4 nerds have little concern for style, immediately narrowing the list down to Voltron, Gandalf or Thor. Rob R. opens with a classic "this is stupid" gambit.

Rob R.: This contest is stupid.
Everyone on that list is mortal, except for Thor and Gandalf. You could possibly include Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger if you consider them some sort of transformed demonic creatures. But of these only Thor and Gandalf have any real God-like abilities. Since Gandalf is actually a demi-God (a Maia), Thor is clearly superior.
Thor is a God, therefore he can't be killed by mortals, so eventually he would win any combat. Gandalf would hold his own for a while, but as a demi-God (a Maia) he would not be as powerful as a full God. Although he could not be killed either, he could eventually be subdued and imprisoned by Thor.

Unfortunately, he trips over his knowledge of Norse god immortality, and the nerds begin to feed.

Gerry D: Part of the cycle of the Norse Gods is to experience Ragnarok (Viking apocalypse)... At which time, everything is renewed. Including Thor. Therefore, even if it were theoretically possible to defeat the Odinson, he would simply re-spawn, and possibly even angrier then when he was killed.

Matt K. : Only after a major continuity-borking crossover, though.

The conversation quickly dissolves into an argument about the respawn rate differences between Gandalf and Thor, then is destroyed by a Ragnarok-like picture of coffee.

Your picks for the winner of the Meltdown Tournament of Nerds, and your picks for which G4 dork would last longest in a Halo 3 rumble pit would be much appreciated.

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