I spend a lot of time talking about how MSNBC gets everything wrong. When you're lineup is clogged with people like Joe "original RINO" Scarborough, Ed "I know nuttink" Schultz, Rachel "smug intelligencia" Maddow, and Chris "Tingles" Matthew, the lies and lunacy pile up faster than snow in Siberia. However, in the interest of fair play, when they tell the truth I feel I should point that out too.
Fortunately, it doesn't happen very often.
Today, however, NBC Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd took to the MSNBC airwaves and laid a little truth on the viewers:
"I was surprised at the number of specific issues mentioned, but the thing that sort of knocked me over was this talk about climate change because we had not really heard it from the president in a very long time. I'm not saying he shelved it, but the issue had taken a little bit of a back seat, and there was a whole paragraph there on climate change in a way you wonder because of Superstorm Sandy and the amount of money, if you are going to talk about the budget, you have to have this conversation about the climate since these natural disasters clearly are becoming more and more, but I want to point out a quote that Barack Obama said in an interview five years ago when he was still running for president, and he compared himself to Reagan.
He says, 'I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.' The reason I point out that quote: I always thought it was an important quote, and it gave you a sense of what kind of President Obama wanted to be, and I think you heard in the Inaugural Address today in the way that President Obama believes Ronald Reagan mainstreamed the conservative movement in the 1980s, that one of the things he wants his presidency to do is to basically mainstream the liberal progressive movement in the same way, so if the country is, say, center or center right, you can have this argument that when he leaves that he has mainstreamed it and moved the country more center left.
And I think you heard that. It was a robust defense of a lot of progressive ideals in a way, and yes - you heard pragmatic pieces to the speech saying, you know, we're not going to get everything we want, things like that, we do need to learn to compromise - But it was pretty clear that he was defending government and defending progressivism in a way that you didn't always hear on the campaign trail, frankly."
OK, so Todd's still towing the goofy company line about global warming causing Hurricaine Sandy, but the rest of his thoughts are dead-on. A major thrust of Obama's second term will be to sell the anti-constitutional overreach of his first term as the new normal. That way, he can not only hang on to legislation already passed, but also push for an even uglier, further left, agenda in the next four years. Rather than shrink back and defend his trampling of the Bill of Rights, he'll make such transgressions seem like perfectly natural moral imperatives.
Today's speech was all about defending the concept of America as a progressive Mecca - the shining, collectivist, city on a hill.
Kudos to Chuck Todd for pointing that out.
