It’s late, I can’t sleep and I’m re-watching tonight’s Rachel Maddow show. The interview with outgoing RNC chairman Michael Steele is interesting, but Steele seems to be as blind as ever about his mismanagement of the RNC the last two years. Maddow, god love her, is essentially softballing on the finance irregularities the show’s been reporting on for more than a year.
I suppose it’s asking too much for a reflective Steele to allow that it wasn’t just the power brokers in the party with an agenda against him: some of what went wrong were choices he made. Maddow is usually less willing to let that kind of evasiveness slide.
So, rather than asking Steele on the show to discuss issues that – as Maddow’s own reporting points out really beg some explanation – instead we get half the interview on the fact that Steele didn’t appear on the show. Steele laid the blame at unnamed folks within the party who – Steele says – also forbade him from appearing on his “buddy” Bill Maher’s show.
See? Pretend the last two years of red meat tossed at the party’s base didn’t really happen; Steele’s been a closet moderate all along. No, really. He watches Rachel and everything.
Pretend the incredible disappearing chairman didn’t really happen. Did the same minders forbid Steele from being in front of a camera for the whole election cycle? There’s a ton left just barely unsaid that begs a followup, which, atypically we just didn’t get.
Maddow is usually so spot on with this kind of interview. A bit of a disappointment, this, I’m sorry to say.
babble 