Progress, of a Sort

NBC’s Tom Brokaw on the eve of the 2008 presidential election:

CHARLIE ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.

TOM BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.

ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.

(Given that both men had whole television news divisions plus the wire services and newspapers that feed them at their beck and call to immediately answer any of their questions, we can assume they were both lying through their, umm, teeth in the above exchange.)

NBC’s Tom Brokaw, this past Monday, in a segment on MSNBC also featuring resident 9/11 Truther/Obama drone aficionado, walking testament to the Orwellian 180-degree pivot Toure. Tom has almost formulated a clue about the president:

I think the president, by my lights at least, spent entirely too much time in the last two weeks campaigning, in effect, all around the country, lining up that Saturday Night Live parody–all those people who will be affected. When he ought to have been maybe at Camp David and said to Boehner and his team and members of the Republican side on the Senate side, ‘Bring the leadership up here, let’s spend five days showing the public that we are interested in trying to make a heroic effort to get a deal, here. Can’t make any calls out to anybody else except maybe your press representatives but not to your caucus members. We’re going to sit here and negotiate this. You’re the leaders of the Congress, I’m the leader of the country. We’ve got to find a way to work this out.’

Tom, the word you’re looking for, but will never, ever utter on the air is: munchkin.