Is MSNBC Now Pimping David Shuster?

Just kidding ...

We like David Shuster here, at The Garlic.

He has a great sense-of-humor, without giving up his granite-nosed journalism, fear taking a holiday about asking the tough questions, or pressing an interview subject (including his own colleagues, like Morning Joke)

I doubt the MSNBC stables are empty, or they lacked budget, so, perhaps, elevating Shuster to take over the 6PM '1600 Pennsylvania Avenue program this week, due to the failing upward of the fourth son of the lost 'My Three Sons' episode, David Gregory (more on "Stretch" below), this was a long-delayed "make-up to Shuster, by the MSNBC suits who hung him out to dry last year, caving in to the Grand Central Station Locker Creature of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Shuster's a pro, and a good interviewer, and it a refreshing change to the program, moving away from Gregory's gattling-gun, round-robin style of throwing out questions to a satellite of talking heads, like hand grenades, requiring said talking heads to responded in equally lightening speed, before they got hit with another one lobbed by Stretch.

At times, it often appeared that there were about six different question hanging in the air, with the assorted guests answering not the same questions as the others, almost reaching the level of a choreographed cacophony.

In fact, we, very much agree with Jane Hamsher, who said;

Shuster consistently did the best TV reporting on the Libby trial and has been doing great coverage of the auto industry bridge loan. He was one of the first to call the Plantation Caucus senators out for union busting and trying to undermine Detroit automakers for the benefit of foriegn manufacturers who had factories in their home states.

The Shuster/Olbermann/Maddow lineup on MSNBC will be a potent one. Great news.

Go get;em David! ... Kick ass and take names!

Now, about that other twit, David Gregory.

We already weighed in, at his announcement of taking over Little Timmy Russert's island, in our "Meet The Freakshow Defender";

Michael Stickings, over on The Reaction, has a great post up, rounding up some reviews of Stretch, in his first tea party;

From David Gregory: "goofily hollow";

"I don't think I've ever heard Gregory say an interesting thing either, and his reporting on the presidential race was mind-bogglingly banal and shallow.

What's worse, though, is that Gregory is an all-too-eager, all-too-pleased-with-himself Beltway insider who, as Patterson puts it, "[embodies] the coziness of the political class" and who is "delighted to be in the club." Forget hard-hitting, independent journalism. Forget even the tiresome "gotcha" journalism of Russert. At the grand and ironic theater that is American politics, Gregory, like so many other Beltway insiders, doesn't so much sit in the audience with us, the people, monitoring, reporting on, and ultimately holding to account the actors on stage, as prance around on stage with the actors themselves, as with Rove in '07, one of them, not one of us, the Fourth Estate fully co-opted by the powers-that-be, itself a power that is ..."

Stickings quotes Troy Patterson, from 'Slate', who offered this gem;

With Gregory now on the job as the moderator of Meet the Press (NBC), the status quo is in good hands. As a White House correspondent, Gregory had a way of confronting the president and his mouthpieces that was sometimes the welcome yap of a tough watchdog but more often the toot-toot of a showboat practicing the pure art of careerism. It feels unfair to say that Gregory is without substance, and yet I'm certain that I watched him host MSNBC's Race for the White House at least twice a week during the election season and just as certain that I remember nothing of the program beyond the punch of the graphics and the pep of the tempo.

Go read both, Stickings, and Patterson's posts, they're good reads.

And, remember, "If it's Sunday, and if it's David Gregory, it's Meet The Freakshow Defender!"