If Mika and Joe actually replace Fluffyhead as the hosts of Meet the Press this country will be getting roughly what it deserves. Don’t get me wrong. The show would improve. How could it not? But it would also be giving up the pretense of being a serious show. And that will be appropriate, because we are no longer a serious country.
A country cannot remain anything other than a joke when it is run by people like John Boehner. It’s just not possible. And he’s actually a relatively sane individual. Any likely replacement for Boehner might as well have been hauled at random out of a psychiatric ward. The GOP has been absolutely wrecked, and with it, the country.
Things are not beyond repair, by any means, but the current iteration of the Republican Party must go away now. Our Sunday morning political shows can go away now, too, because this country doesn’t do policy anymore and we don’t have civil debates based on sane differences of opinion and priority. We used to have public intellectuals but that’s gone now as well. If you can imagine Charlie Rose having a conversation between Sheldon Whitehouse and Louie Gohmert then you have some idea of how precisely pointless it has become to try to talk about anything. On one side you have someone knowledgable and thoughtful and on the other side you have someone with pinwheels in his eyes who really ought to be hauled out of the studio in a straightjacket.
The Democrats, even the whole left, have been stripped of the opportunity to practice the art of politics and left handling a burlap sack of ravenous rabid weasels. We can occasionally whack them with a stick to try to keep them under control, but we can’t sit down at a table on Sunday morning and reason with them.
So, by all means, turn Meet the Press into Morning Joe. No one will notice the difference, and those who would mourn have already begun mourning.