Saturday, June 02, 2018                                           3:27 AM

Rachel Maddow and Me   (2018Jun02)

Wouldn’t you love to see me on Rachel Maddow? There’d be the guest-who-makes-sense and Rachel, the host—then me, and the Trump-apologizer. It doesn’t need to be me, specifically—just anyone off the street with a scintilla of decency and a good set of lungs.

See, everyone else there is constrained—Rachel is a journalist, which bars her from expressing herself beyond the facts—the other guest will have a media reputation to protect, not to mention a commentator-circuit rice bowl that must be respected. Those people are not free to speak their minds.

I think it would offer great relief to the entire nation, if someone like me was sitting next to a bloviating Giuliani, or a drawling Conway, and could turn to them and say how I really feel about their torture of the Constitution and common sense. The media pretends they are trapped into reading out Trump’s daily tweets, no matter how ugly or ignorant—and politely begging to disagree with the downright criminal inhumanity spewed from the mouths of these Trump-zombies. The political-news shows don’t need to be so maddeningly obtuse in their format.

All they have to do is add one more seat at the dais—the ‘laypersons viewpoint’ person—someone who can just walk on for one show and walk away afterwards, opinion given, no strings attached. All of this insanity would be so much easier to digest if a normal person had a chance to respond to the face of, in real-time, these professional haters and skeeves. Even if it’s just to, say, call one of them a POS, and walk off set—even just that would help a great deal in suppressing this ‘amnesty-on-bullshit’ Trump’s got going.

We could do something like it at press conferences, too—have some pompous ass give a mealy-mouthed half-true answer to a simple question, then turn to the designated ‘laypersons viewpoint’ person—and ask him or her what they thought of the spokesperson’s response. In this way, we could begin to leaven all the bullshit, with frequent instances of regular folks calling bullshit.

Everyman-Reactions are a time-honored component of broadcast news—there’s nothing unprofessional about taking the pulse of the ‘man on the street’. But in the present media environment, we need those truth-tellers right on the spot, every time the people who are eroding our society open their yaps.

You’re thinking, ‘What about the yahoos?”—right? That’s the beauty of it—if a real Trump-supporter ends up in the everyman slot, it’ll still work out—because there’s nothing more embarrassing and futile than two idiots trying to agree with one another.