Did anyone see this? A moment ago Rachel Maddow was tearing apart those who lied and slimed us into the Iraq war, dismantling all the excuses that were used by the Bush administration, when suddenly her mic went off. Now, a moment before, she was showing Bush joking at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner about “no weapons here, no weapons there,” and there was a brief interval where the audio goes off on the video — you can’t hear Bush for about the first seven seconds of that clip; then you get about seven seconds of Bush kidding about WMDs.
Then they cut back to Maddow as she summarizes how disgusting it is that Bush had joked about this, and her audio goes off. She’s talking but you can’t quite hear her; it takes her a moment to figure this out. You can hear her on a microphone off to the side of the set. She taps her lapel several times and says, looks at the camera and says, “This is unusual.”
They cut to commercial — a few commercials. When she returns, they go back to a series of video snips that we just saw of Bush telling lie after lie. So there is a bit of backtracking but you don’t see Bush joking at the Correspondent’s Dinner.
After the video, they cut back to Maddow — and in her first words, she describes how she’s in her “home studio, not on a satellite feed,” and describes how the mic is hard wired to her lapel, keeping her “pinned to the desk.” Then she adds, “I’m such a conspiracy theorist, I cannot tell you what I’m thinking right now, it would discredit me forever.”
Then she resumes the segment. She’s still in that same segment, and one of her colleagues asks how she’s doing and she says, “Alright, I think.”
Astrology note: Mercury is retrograde; the Moon has just gone into Gemini. It was void of course in Taurus as Obama gave his short speech. Of the three MSNBC reporters who were commenting after the speech, including Chris Matthews and anchor Keith Olbermann, she was by far the most critical — actually angry (not that Keith was tame). Maddow’s piece is called “Credit Where It’s Due,” a comment on how FOX News and McCain and others want Obama to credit Bush for the “victory” in Iraq.
Maddow, who was more outspoken about the war at Air America, went gloves-off when her 9 pm time slot came up. Credit where it’s due. Indeed.
Eric,
Good point. Just as Linda commented earlier this week about beck and palin, we don’t want to give power to the negative with our words. We want to put our energy and voice where it will do the most good, affirming what we want to see instead of raising what we fear.
That being said, please understand that you have also written here that there are no accidents. We have heard your voice on that matter as well.
We need to go easy or not at all on anyone getting killed off. A technical error – or shall I say meaningful synchronicity – is not that heavy. Plenty of truthtellers live on; what we need to do is to stop marginalizing them, start funding them and supporting them, and start doing it ourselves.
The rhetoric of our society, our media, our environment, is getting increasingly violent and crusade-like. I am actually surprised to see it here and I suggest we go in another direction.
For one thing anyone who believes that “bad things happen to truthtellers” is making a case for shutting up and/or lying. So I suggest we start making the case for radical honesty and how it improves our lives.
Eric – That clip of Bush joking about “no WMD’s here – heh, heh!” used to be available on youtube. It may still be, but I haven’t got the stomach to look for it. It was disgusting enough the first time around.
Eric/Len – As much as I’d like to believe Maddow’s mic failure was no more than an ironic Merc retro twist (the Trickster’s been particularly savage this time around, at least with me), Len’s observation the other day – that it’s the truth-tellers who get killed off – do give one pause in this instance, and an uncomfortable one at that.
Fe – a thousand times, AMEN!
Eric,
Way to go! This qualifies as a scoop od sorts. The question is, how big. The Moon-Jupiter sextile may indeed indicate that Ms. Maddow was wise to exercise restraint. However, her evident connection with Eris which is opposed to Venus along the AC-DC axis gives credence to her intuition that this was no accident. Add in the position of the nodes along the MC-IC axis and we have our own little hoary cardinal cross which is just askew enough to ask you what the point of messing with Ms. Maddow may have been. Was she deterred from saying something she planned to say? Don’t think so. Was somebody sending a message? Could be.
Nothing about the Iraq War should be declared a victory.
If there’s credit that the Bush Administration deserves tonight, its that they kept their garbage-filled mouths shut while Obama began the closing of the door on this disgusting chapter in our country’s history.
And they should keep them shut. Forever.