Rachel Maddow Cuts Down Bill Maher and Charles Cooke Like Weeds [View all]

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Rachel Maddow Cuts Down Bill Maher and Charles Cooke Like Weeds

Rachel Maddow needs to get out more, as evidenced by her performance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher this weekend. While the host of The Rachel Maddow Show churns out astute political essays five nights a week on MSNBC, her talent for casually destroying the fallacious thinking of others, to their faces, is woefully underused in that role. Case in point: Maddow’s effortless destruction of Bill Maher and The National Review‘s Charles Cooke.

It is a relatively simple matter to sound smart when you’re talking to yourself, in front of an audience that generally agrees with you, and this is a large part of what Maher, Maddow, and Cooke do on a regular basis. What separates the wheat from the chaff is how those skillfully spun thoughts hold up in an actual conversation, and on Friday night’s Real Time rock-paper-scissors matchup, Maddow brought Hattori Hanzo steel.

First, Cooke and Maher actually began on decently solid ground by criticizing MSNBC’s coverage of Governor Chris Christie‘s (R-NJ) scandals. While Maddow has been eating everyone’s lunch on this story for months, and hosts like Steve Kornacki and Chris Hayes have developed reporting and interviews that have moved the story forward, a lot of the rest of the coverage has been a repetitive waste of time. Maher and fellow panelist Jane Harman even managed to throw in a devastating knock at MSNBC’s “Breaking News” cutaway to Justin Bieber‘s arraignment.

However, when Maher and Cooke tried to make a dollar out of their fifteen-cent insights, Maddow cut them down with a flick of the wrist. Maher’s catchy phrase, “It’s not Watergate,” ignored the fact that Watergate wasn’t Watergate, either, until it was. Maddow patiently explained the developments in the story that she was the only one covering at the time, and which continue to this day, and that “When you have gonzo political corruption stories, you cover them.”

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Full post here: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rachel-maddow-cuts-down-bill-maher-and-charles-cooke-like-weeds/