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Sunday, March 18, 2012

Keeping Up

Ezra Klein guest-hosted Up! this weekend. I found the discussion each day a less chaotic scrum when facilitated by Klein than it often has seemed to become with Hayes lately (maybe one of the reasons, especially with a newborn baby in his world, he decided on a vacation). To be completely honest, I think Hayes sometimes allows his crankier and (comparatively) more reactionary guests to behave badly at the table, diverting topics onto abstract tangents, interrupting others (which is especially annoying when it is a badly behaved man interrupting a women who knows more than he does, which is usually how these things play out) and so on. Klein's ship seemed to run more smoothly this weekend -– and perhaps lacked both the lows but also some of the serendipities that spark up on your usual Up! Hayes still beats Klein hands down when it comes to the quilting point solo editorials with which Hayes punctuates the chaos. Klein was a bit stumbly-mouthed and lacked altogether the righteous clarifying poetry Hayes brings to these moments. When Klein played his editorials in the mode of flat-flooted nerd humor, though, it was hard not to root for him. I thought Alexis Goldstein and Antonia Juhasz were great guests to day and Rajiv Chandrasekaran was good yesterday. On a different note, it is still an incredible relief to watch MSNBC on Sunday mornings, which alone among the Sunday squawkers has women talking about politics at a time when politics is incessantly dictating to women in the most obnoxious horrifying manner imaginable (Melissa Harris-Perry has been an even more conspicuous and welcome corrective on this score), and which alone among the Sunday squawkers isn't just an incessant monologue of Republicans congratulating themselves to another even when they aren't in office. On another different note, and an altogether gratuitous one at that, I still think Ezra Klein looks eerily like Emma Goldman when he purses his mouth with his little round spectacles on.

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