Combat television on MSNBC

In the past week, there have been several interesting sparring matches on MSNBC as it seems that liberals are trying to grow a set of balls.

First was Joe Scarborough and Max Bluementhal. Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah argues that the Republican party has been hijacked by right-wing evangelical Christians. Scarborough began pressing Blumenthal on why he feels that evangelical Christians have no right to participate in politics, but the conversation quickly shifted to a discussion on extremism.

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Then there's the Dylan Ratigan/Betsy McCaughey feud. Betsy McCaughey is a liar (famously exposed by Jon Stewart over the summer) whom the media keep inviting on their programs to continue to lie about health care. And so, today she ended up on Dylan Ratigan's Morning Meeting with Representative Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.). There was a brief, mad moment where I thought that this might end well, but it didn't.

The tactics McCaughey deploys in situations like this are a heavy-duty pretense that she supports health care reform, the Palin-esque answer-a-question-with-an-answer-to-a-question-of-her-liking technique, the ability to quickly provide information and opinion that's completely beside the point, et cetera. Unfortunately, Ratigan wanted to have a discussion on health care competition and cost containment, and that didn't dovetail too well with what McCaughey prefers to do in such a debate: set aside all substantive issues so that she can fearmonger about seniors being killed by the government.

And so, McCaughey unleashed her SENIOR CITIZEN HEALTH CARE APOCALYPSE nonsense, accusing Weiner of being ignorant and telling Ratigan that he wasn't a "fair moderator," to which Ratigan replied, "Well, you're not a fair answerer." Ratigan gamely attempted to get McCaughey to reconcile how she'd continue to provide the current level of unsustainable funding to Medicare without updating the system to address its inefficiencies, to no avail.

McCAUGHEY: This will go down in history as one of the most browbeating interviews in television history.

RATIGAN: I hope that it does, and maybe you'll learn to go on television to answer questions as opposed to casting accusations.

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