Oh, Joy-Ann!

MSNBC just made it official: Joy-Ann Reid, usually referred to simply as Joy Reid, is taking over Chris Matthews' old weeknight time slot permanently.  Her new program, punningly named "The Reidout," premieres July 20.

I won't be watching of course, as I have had a problem with Reid ever since I heard that she questioned Florida politician Charlie Crist's integrity over his sexual orientation in a mocking matter on a blog and deflected blame for it to hackers, probably the most implausible explanation for incriminating prose since . . . since . . . well, memory of a similar incident fails me, but you can read what I said about it here.  I used to like Reid, as I said before, but her political-correctness spiel and her smugness wore thin over time, and now it's almost threadbare.

When the press noted that Reid was the first black woman to host a show on MSNBC, I was wondering, "Why this black woman?" - for the reasons above. If they wanted a black woman to helm the 7:00 PM Eastern slot, couldn't they have tried to steal away Abby Phillip from CNN?  (My mother wanted to see Ali Velshi get the time slot.)  But it is what it is, and if I watch cable news at all in that hour, CNN's Erin Burnett is my only recourse.   

As for Reid's two-hour weekend morning program, "AM Joy," that's being phased out in favor of her new weeknight gig, with no indication as to who will take over that two-hour time slot.  I vote for Steve Kornacki.  Maybe it's important for someone like Reid to look at the news from a perspective involving race and politics, but we need Steve to look at the news - especially politics - through his expertise with numbers.  (As for Ali Velshi, he has an earlier two-hour weekend time slot.)  As Trump and Biden try to pin down their bases and look for swing votes in what promises to be a tough presidential election campaign, and as COVID-19 will likely ravage the nation long after the last ballot is counted, we need a numbers guy like Kornacki, whom I would have preferred to see replaced Matthews on weeknights, to have a show of his own.  Maybe not for two whole hours, but we certainly need him.

As for the loss of Matthews back in March, I must admit I'm already missing his Winston Churchill references.  

Taking His Hardball and Going Home

Last week, I wrote on this blog that it was time for MSNBC's Chris Matthews to retire after he compared Bernie Bros to the Wehrmacht.  This past Monday, he did just that.  I'm glad to see that Matthews discovered my blog and took my advice.

Okay, Matthews, whom I've always had a love-hate attitude toward, likely never even saw my blog, unless he Googled himself and went through all 170 million results.  But he did in fact retire, thanks not only to his Sanders gaffe but also for a bunch of comments he made to women.  This past Friday, he had to deal with a magazine GQ column from journalist Laura Bassett, who charged that Matthews complimented her appearance by rhetorically asking, "Why haven’t I fallen in love with you yet?"  At a cocktail party from a single man, that comment might have been appropriate.  But when the supposedly happily married Matthews made that comment to Bassett  just before a televised discussion with her about sexual-assault allegations against Trump . . . uh, yeah, that was more than a little awkward.  In fact, Bassett added for good measure that Matthews "has a pattern of making comments about women's appearances in demeaning ways."

For the record, Bassett is an attractive woman, but that's all I'll say about that.  I may have already said too much.

While all this was going on, Matthews mistook Jaime Harrison, a South Carolina Democrat running for the U.S. Senate there, with Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott, also of South Carolina. Both men are black.  Both of them are also bald, but any fool can tell them apart.  Black people do not all look alike, of course, and Matthews' mistake would have been understandable if this had been a Julie Wolfe-Esmé Marshall situation (two models who look so much alike that when I met Julie Wolfe, I began to tell her that she looked like Esmé Marshall only to have Ms. Wolfe finish my sentence for me), or even if it were a Dom DeLuise-Chef Paul Prudhomme situation.  It was nothing of the sort.

So, on Monday night, after opening his show "Hardball," Matthews - who does not look like Dom DeLuise or Chef Paul Prudhomme - announced his retirement on the air.  And while he finished his sentences - especially the one about how it was time for a new generation more in step with the times to take over at MSNBC and the one about how he was sorry for his demeaning comments about women (none of which involve Julie Wolfe or Esmé Marshall) - he did not finish the hour of his show.  After "Hardball" returned from its first commercial break, Steve Kornacki was sitting in Matthews' place looking as stunned as everyone watching at home must have been.  And so an era ends.  We'll have to wait for a new era to begin; a rotation of different hosts - including, I suspect, the insufferable Joy Reid - will fill in the 7 PM Eastern hour until a permanent host can be found.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. Maybe we should have known something was up when Matthews did not take part in MSNBC's coverage of the South Carolina primary this past Saturday, reducing the gaffe-machine squad to just Joe Biden (who urged people to support Jaime Harrison's presidential bid).

Sorry to see you go, Chris.  Well, not really, especially after that remark on Election Night 2012 about how you were glad we had Hurricane Sandy the week before because it brought about opportunities for good politics.

Hopefully, Joy Reid will follow Matthews out the door sooner or later, and maybe also Chuckles the Clown (also known as Chuck Todd).