Rachel Maddow is Full of Bull Puckey

It gives me absolutely no joy to write that title. I've admired Rachel for a long time now, ever since she first started filling in for Keith Olbermann on his nights off of Countdown. But it's the truth and I have to tell it, because I'm sick of the media misrepresenting Senator Sanders and his campaign and I'm angry that Rachel has sunk to this level.

Last night as I was going through my Twitter feed I stumbled upon this tweet by Thom Hartmann.

While at the same time Rachel accuses Sanders of "bull puckey" on M$NBC & Joy Reid red-baits him here. #TurnedTVOff https://t.co/bFUenBAh05

— Thom Hartmann (@Thom_Hartmann) March 29, 2016

I was surprised because I thought Rachel had been one of the few bastions of integrity left at MSNBC. But she had fallen to the dark side about a week ago when her Maddowblog ran a story entitled Sanders Surprises with Controversial Superdelegate Strategy, in which it was made to look like Senator Sanders had said that he would accept winning the nomination on Superdelegates without having won the will of the people, the pledged delegates. This erroneous assertion was first floated in a Politico story cited in the Maddowblog entry. I'm not going to litigate that story as well, but suffice it to say that story puts words in the Sanders campaign's mouth the same way Maddowblog does. Then, when Rachel interviews Senator Sanders it comes up again.

Rachel tries not once, not twice, but THRICE to get Sanders to say that he would accept being the nominee without the will of the people and each time he refuses to do so. The closest that he comes to agreeing with the premise of her question is on his third answer.

"I think it is probably the case that the candidate who has the most pledged delegates is going to be the candidate, but there are other factors."

What he's really saying there is that it's up to the Superdelegates who they support, he's trying to make a case for Superdelegates to come over to his side like any sane candidate would do, but at no time in the exchanges as you can see for yourself does he ever say he thinks he should win without a majority of pledged delegates. He does say he believes that in states where he won a large amount of the vote the Superdelegates should consider him, which I think is a reasonable way to pressure these undemocratic Superdelegates to switch to him, but you're free to make your own judgment on that strategy. After this incident I shrugged it off, everyone makes mistakes and Rachel has done more than enough for the Progressive movement to earn a pass every now and then.

But, after reading Thom Hartmann's tweet I made it a point to check out the story when I woke up today. I found that Rachel ran a story entitled Sanders Campaign Rewrites History of Losses. If that was indeed the case I was going to be disappointed in Bernie's campaign, and argue that whoever said it should be cut loose. But, it isn't true and here's why.

First, I've highlighted the relevant part of the story below, but I've also included a link to the whole video above for transparency sake.




In the story Rachel cites a Mother Jones article entitled This is How Bernie Sanders Will Win the Nomination in which Senior Strategist for the Sanders campaign Tad Devine says "Her grasp now on the nomination is almost entirely on the basis of victories where Bernie Sanders did not compete." Rachel then goes on to surmise that he is saying "The only reason (we've) lost this far is because (we) weren't trying to win." The problem Rachel is running in to here is that she is mistaken about the definition of "Compete." to her to compete means to try, when in actuality compete means to try to win.

Compete: To try to get or win something (such as a prize or reward) that someone else is also trying to win : to try to be better or more successful than someone or something else.

Rachel then goes on, with this false premise, to conclude that since the Sanders campaign had offices and workers in the states mentioned in the Mother Jones article (Offices and workers that she herself reported on before Super Tuesday) that Sanders did in fact try in those states and thus called the assertion made by the Sanders campaign "Bull Puckey."

But wait, if the Sanders campaign wasn't trying to win in those states what were they trying to do? Well, Rachel alludes to it earlier in this same story.

"No states on the Democratic side are winner take all."

That's right Rachel, Sanders wasn't trying to win the aforementioned states, (although I'm sure he wouldn't have minded) he wasn't trying to compete; which as we all know now means trying to win. He was trying to get as many delegates as he could out of states he knew to be unfavorable to him; a perfectly reasonable strategy in states where he knew he couldn't win outright. This effort was a success, as Senator Sanders got 238 delegates in these contests. Now maybe you're thinking to yourself that I'm a Sanders supporter and so I can't be impartial on this, well you're wrong but even if you weren't Tad Devine says that I'm right in a quote from the article that adds much needed context and is yet conspicuously missing from the Maddow story.

"Where we compete with Clinton, where this competition is real, we have a very good chance of beating her in every place that we compete with her."

Do I accept that a woman who holds a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford and a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford doesn't know the definition of the word Compete? Actually I do, because language is funny and sometimes people say things that don't actually mean what they think it does, if you've ever heard someone misuse literally when they mean figuratively you know what I mean.

What I don't accept is that a journalist with the aforementioned education and the experience Rachel Maddow has doesn't know how to look up a word in the dictionary in the internet age, doesn't know how to read an entire article to get much needed context, doesn't ask for clarification from a campaign they have the ability to at least attempt to contact and doesn't acknowledge that trying to get SOME delegates from states that weren't likely to be won is a form of trying BEFORE said journalist accuses them of lying. Come on Rachel, you know better which is why you're full of bull puckey.

Finally, because I'm feeling particularly nitpickey today there's this.

Rachel says

"...that's just the pledged delegates, leave aside the issue of the Superdelegates which is a whole different discussion..."

But then she proceeds to show the current delegate count INCLUDING THE SUPERDELEGATES; And she should know better, because when Chair of the DNC and closet Clinton backer Debbie Wasserman-Schultz chastised the media for including Superdelegates in the totals who was she talking to? I'll give you one guess...