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      Nancy Pelosi signals hard line on formation of 6 January select committee

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      Nancy Pelosi is poised to take a hard line should Republicans try to derail her recently announced select committee into the 6 January Capitol attack and she may appoint its members at her sole discretion, according to a source familiar with the matter.The committee, which passed the House in a near-party-line vote on Wednesday, will have eight members appointed by Democrats and four members appointed by Republicans, as well as broad subpoena power and no deadline to complete its work.“We have the duty, to the constitution and the country, to find the truth of the January 6th insurrection and to ensure that such an assault on our Democracy cannot happen again,” the House speaker wrote in a letter to colleagues.But, deeply distrustful of the GOP, Pelosi is prepared to veto any Republican member and is considering not allowing any Republican who objected to the certification of Joe Biden’s election win to serve on the select committee, the source said.The thinly veiled warning being sent behind the scenes to the Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, reflects Pelosi’s resolve to investigate the root causes of the Capitol attack that left five dead and scores more injured and shocked many Americans.It also underscored Pelosi’s far-reaching power over the select committee in the Democratic-controlled House and her ability to shape the contours of an investigation that could continue through the midterm elections in 2022 and give Democrats a powerful tool to hit Republicans with.The speaker remains acutely aware of how Republicans, in a stark display of loyalty to Trump and self-interest to shield themselves from an inquiry that could tarnish their party, blocked the creation of a 9/11-style commission into the Capitol attack.Pelosi has expressed in private that she will not allow the select committee to be derailed, the source said, and could block the appointment of extremist Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who refused to accept Biden’s win.An additional concern raised by some Democrats, but not Pelosi herself, revolves around how to approach conflict of interest situations with Republicans who might be named to the select committee but also be connected to events on or before 6 January.McCarthy is likely to be deposed by the select committee himself over his phone call to Trump as the insurrection unfolded. McCarthy begged Trump to call off the rioters, only for the former president to side with his supporters.The top Republican on the House judiciary committee, Jim Jordan – a likely pick by McCarthy for the select committee – also appeared to suggest in recent months that he spoke with Trump during the insurrection.Such conversations between Trump and top House Republicans are significant as they address the crucial question of what Trump was doing and saying as the Capitol was overrun, and will almost certainly be of central importance to the committee’s investigation.The deliberations over whether to take that kind of aggressive move – which would in effect see Pelosi unilaterally decide appointments to the select committee – come as the speaker prepares to decide on a chair and her other Democratic members.Among the leading contenders to lead the committee is the House homeland security committee chair, Bennie Thompson, who negotiated the framework of the aborted 9/11-style commission into 6 January, and has the backing of the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn.As for the other Democratic appointments, members of Pelosi’s leadership and whip teams are not expecting the speaker to name any managers from Trump’s second impeachment trial to the committee, with the possible exception of congressman Jamie Raskin, the source said.The fraught situation surrounding the select committee, which would hand Democrats sweeping power to issue subpoenas for witnesses and documents that could reveal new information about the Capitol attack, is indicative of a highly partisan dynamic on Capitol Hill.The bill to create the select committee became a lightning rod for Republicans after the framework mirrored the language the GOP used for the 2014 select committee to investigate the attack on a US compound in Benghazi, Libya.Pelosi has reiterated the 6 January select committee will examine the root causes of the Capitol attack, though for months, Republicans have argued Democrats are fixated on 6 as a way of tarnishing Trump and their party.Pelosi moved to create a special House select committee – among the top weapons for congressional oversight – after Senate Republicans blocked the commission, fearful that a close accounting of the Capitol attack could pose an existential threat to the GOP.The speaker maintained that she preferred an independent inquiry modeled on the commission set up after the September 11 terrorist attacks. But with Republicans opposed and downplaying the riot, she eventually conceded that only a select committee was possible.“It is imperative that we seek the truth,” Pelosi said. “It is clear the Republicans are afraid of the truth.”Several investigations into the Capitol attack are already under way across the justice department and Capitol Hill, but they have lacked a mandate to conduct a forensic examination of both the circumstances and causes of the assault. More

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      House votes to remove statues of white supremacists from US Capitol

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      The House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to remove statues of white supremacists and Confederate leaders who advocated for slavery from the US Capitol.The vote passed 285 to 120 with every Democrat present and 67 Republicans voting in favor of the legislation, which directs the removal of “all statues of individuals who voluntarily served in the Confederate States of America or of the military forces or government of a State while the State was in rebellion against the United States”.Representative Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, said that honoring these men sent a message in the US Capitol that Black people’s lives are not valued.“It’s personally an affront to me as a Black man to walk around and look at these figures and see them standing tall, looking out as if they were visionaries and they did something that was great. No, they did something that was very hurtful to humanity,” Johnson said.The legislation specifically calls for the removal of statues of three men who supported slavery and segregation: the North Carolina governor Charles Aycock, Vice-President John Calhoun and the Arkansas senator James Clarke.It also orders the replacement of a bust of Roger Taney, who owned enslaved people and wrote the 1857 supreme court decision that denied enslaved people citizenship. The bust would be replaced with one of Thurgood Marshall, who became the first Black supreme court justice in 1967 and who previously won a landmark supreme court case which said school segregation was unconstitutional, Brown v Board of Education.Some Republicans in the debate highlighted that Democrats represented the south during the civil war. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, said he supported the bill but emphasized “all the statues being removed by this bill are statues of Democrats.”A similar bill passed the House last year but the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, declined to bring the measure to a vote. It is more likely to be introduced to the Senate now that Democrats have a slight majority. For the legislation to succeed, 10 Republican senators would have to vote in favor of it with every Democrat because of the filibuster rule.The House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland, reintroduced the legislation in May and said: “It’s never too late to do the right thing, and this legislation would work to right a historic wrong while ensuring our Capitol reflects the principles and ideals of what Americans stand for.”The majority of Confederate memorials were put up decades after the civil war, according to a database created by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The period which saw the biggest spike in the creation of these statues was in the 1900s, when southern states enacted Jim Crow laws that limited the rights of Black people after a period of integration.The push to remove Confederate symbols from public places has been going on for decades and ramped up last year during civil rights protests. In 2020, at least 160 Confederate symbols were taken down or removed from public spaces, according to the SPLC database. More

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      Biden’s Myth of Bipartisanship Takes a Hit

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      In January, Joe Biden assumed the leadership of a nation in disarray. On Donald Trump’s watch, the US had struggled for nearly a year to come to terms with a pandemic that disrupted not just the economy, but people’s lives and relationships. Last summer, an unprecedented protest movement against the brutal treatment of black Americans rivaled the COVID-19 pandemic for headlines. These parallel events underlined deep contradictions that have long existed in the social fabric. As a parting gesture, Trump chose to put on display the apparently irreparable division of the body politic by encouraging a mob to assault Congress as it prepared to validate his election loss.

      UFOs and the Strategy of Affirmative Uncertainty

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      Those particular events were dramatic enough. But in the background lay other pressing issues. First among them was the rapid decline of the health of the planet due to anthropogenic climate change. At the same time, the effects of wealth and income disparity became ever more visible inside the US and across the globe. In the background was the persistence of wars, terrorism and global instability accompanied by a very real nuclear threat, aggravated by powerful nations’ obsession with producing increasingly sophisticated weaponry. Arms sales had become essential for the economies of Western nations, exacerbating instability in entire regions of the world. Not only the American people but also the global population were becoming increasingly aware of the stakes implied by these converging issues. In this context, expectations grew for Biden’s FDR-style change in American politics. Not that he would challenge the existing order, but that he would for once address the real issues.

      President Biden thus entered the White House with an implicit mission to restore a semblance of order, whatever that meant. Observers quickly discovered that today’s version of US democracy entertains two possible approaches to restoring order. The first, which to many people appears logical, requires assessing the nature of the crises and promoting policies designed specifically to address the perceived causes. The second is clearly less logical but represents a long-standing tradition a seasoned politician such as Joe Biden fully understood. It consists of weighing the opinions and interests of the two parties that share power and devising solutions that do not threaten their specific interests. It also implies relegating the needs and desires of the nation’s population to a secondary position.

      Biden quickly put his well-honed skills to work. The New York Times describes the dramatic scene in which he “strode to the cameras on the White House driveway on [June 24], flanked by an equal number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, to proudly announce an overall infrastructure agreement totaling $1.2 trillion over eight years that could cement his legacy as a bipartisan deal maker.” 

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Bipartisan:

      A descriptive term for any agreement between the two dominant parties designed to buttress the status quo, bipartisanship becoming a necessary ingredient when the status quo itself has become exceptionally dysfunctional, built on policies that are unpopular with the majority of the electorate but considered vital to the preservation of donor support by the political class

      Contextual Note

      Progressive Democrats wasted no time expressing their displeasure with a bill that fails to address even the most tepid of Biden’s campaign promises concerning the real problems the nation was facing. Emboldened by his belief in his own bipartisan superpowers and wishing to appease progressives, Biden explained, in response to a question from the press, his commitment to pushing through another bill that would deal with those issues. He even promised to reject the bipartisan version he had just negotiated if it was not accompanied by the partisan version. The Times commented: “It may not seem like much, but it was enough to upend Mr. Biden’s proud bipartisan moment.” Pride certainly appears to be a more powerful motivator for the president than problem-solving.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Revealing the strategy that would have had a chance of working only if left unmentioned, Biden announced, “if this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it.” This set off a firestorm among his bipartisan partners, who judged they had been taken for a ride. Over the next 24 hours, Biden had to find a way of walking back his imprudent remarks. He dutifully promised to back the original bill with no conditions, and peace was restored. Republicans now have a clear path to devise ways of canceling the threat of action being taken on the issues that matter.

      There is still a small chance Biden could succeed by mobilizing every member of the Democratic Party to pass the “real” infrastructure bill through reconciliation. But the odds seem rather long. This leaves some observers wondering whether the gaffe was inadvertent. Perhaps Biden’s real bipartisan aim was to provide his opponents with a pretext for ensuring that the second bill never gets passed.

      “The drama does not appear to have sunk the deal,” The Times writes reassuringly, “but Mr. Biden admitted that his comments on Thursday left ‘the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to.’” That was ‘certainly not my intent,’ he added.” This glib explanation of the confusion may sum up the public’s perception of the first months of the Biden presidency. There is a thick fog around his intent.

      Politico reports that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell criticized accused Biden of “‘completely caving’ to the party’s left wing and has repeatedly emphasized his commitment to derailing Biden‘s progressive agenda.” What this means is that the nation must prepare for a direct confrontation between the ideologies of the two parties, the very opposite of bipartisan government. The logic has come full circle, as often happens these days in Washington.

      Historical Note

      The myth of bipartisanship in US politics is relatively new. It is linked to the emergence a century ago of a binary political system in which only two dominant parties could legitimately claim the right to govern. It took new meaning in recent decades once the parties had settled into their stable ideological identities. For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, the Democratic Party drew its capacity to govern from its force as a coalition of Northern liberals and Southern segregationist Dixiecrats. The Republicans had their own two factions: Northeastern liberals and heartland conservatives. In such circumstances, bipartisanship was both an inevitable ingredient of almost all legislation and a meaningless concept. Once the Democrats became “the liberals” and the Republicans “the conservatives,” bipartisanship would become a real challenge.

      Joe Biden entered Congress at a time when the old bipartisanship was fading but not yet deceased. At one point, progressives excoriated Biden for expressing his nostalgia for the days when he collaborated respectfully with white supremacists. The progressives were right in their reproach, but not for the moral reasons they cited. Rather for what it indicates about Biden’s inability to dissociate himself from an irrelevant past. He still hasn’t adapted to today’s very different reality.

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      The idea of bipartisanship may be the central myth of the Biden presidency. Conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have fallen in love with it and revere Biden for his commitment to it. Senator Mark Warner, a conservative Democrat, lauded Biden’s successful negotiation in these terms: “The message it sends to the American people, and also to our friends and adversaries around the world, is so important. In a post-Jan. 6 world, it shows that people who come from different political views can still come together on national priorities.” The fiasco that followed Biden’s threat to veto his own bill demonstrates the absurdity of this maudlin sentiment.

      Despite persistent public quarrels about budgets and taxation required to maintain the conservative or liberal label of the two parties, bipartisanship has actually been the norm in recent decades. And it is a destructive norm. Critiquing Biden’s brazenly illegal bombing this weekend of Iraq and Syria, Glenn Greenwald makes this historical point: “This has continued for close to two full decades now because the establishment wings of both parties support it. Neither of them believes in the Constitution or the rule of law, nor do they care in the slightest about the interests of anyone other than the large corporate sectors that fund the establishment wings of both parties.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Trump called White House Covid taskforce ‘that fucking council’, book says

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      Amid chaos at the White House as the coronavirus pandemic worsened, Donald Trump took to referring derisively to the Covid taskforce chaired by his vice-president as “that fucking council that Mike has”.The revelation about the president’s contempt for his key advisory body is one among many in a new book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, which is published in the US on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Previous revelations from the book have included that Trump wanted to send infected Americans to Guantánamo Bay and that he mused about John Bolton, his national security adviser, being “taken out” by Covid.Authors Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, both Washington Post reporters, also report in depth on how the extraordinary influence of “outside consultants” to Trump, including the controversial Stephen Moore, relentlessly undermined the work of the president’s scientific advisers.The book is a deeply reported account of the beginning of a pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 in the US and a federal response hamstrung by incompetence and infighting.Trump’s derisive term for his task force, the authors write, was “a signal that he wished it would go away” and “didn’t want anyone to exert leadership”.“Many on the task force didn’t want the responsibility either, fearful of the consequences.”Under the chairmanship of Vice-President Mike Pence – who is shown resisting his own appointment to replace the outmatched health secretary, Alex Azar – the task force was led by Dr Deborah Birx, a US Army physician widely praised for her role in the fight against Aids but whose star waned under Trump.Abutaleb and Paletta portray Birx as a confident leader unafraid to challenge powerful men, but also someone who “overplayed her hand” when she decided to praise and flatter Trump as a way to manage him.Of an interview Birx gave to the rightwing Christian Broadcasting Network, in which she praised Trump’s “ability to analyse and integrate data”, the authors write: “It was the kind of sycophancy one expected from Pence or [treasury secretary] Steve Mnuchin, not a government scientist.”The authors also say Birx worked well with Pence and was admired by fellow workers, though by April 2020, chief of staff Mark Meadows was deriding the task force as “useless and broken”.Birx served until the end of the Trump administration in January this year. Unlike her fellow task force member Anthony Fauci, now chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, she did not remain in public service.Abutaleb and Paletta also report that in March, as cases spiraled and the US death toll passed 1,000, unofficial adviser Stephen Moore, Trump’s “emissary [from] the conservative establishment … strode into the Oval Office to convince the president” to end shutdowns and get the economy moving.Moore is an economist who in 2019 was nominated by Trump to the board of the Federal Reserve, only to withdraw after outlets led by the Guardian reported controversies in his past.He told Abutaleb and Paletta Trump’s controversial and soon dropped promise to reopen the US economy by Easter was “the smart thing to do”, because “the economic costs of this are mounting and there’s not a lot of evidence that lockdowns are working to stop the spread”.Lockdowns to stop the spread of Covid-19 remain in use around the world.Moore is also quoted attacking Fauci, a common target for conservative ire over subjects including mask-wearing and the origins of Covid in China.“Fauci is the villain here,” Moore says. “He has the Napoleon complex, and he thinks he is the dictator who could decide how to run the country.”Moore also says conservative activists he advised as they staged protests against lockdowns and masks – and who he famously claimed were successors of the great civil rights protester Rosa Parks – asked: “What’s wrong with this fucking Fauci? Sometimes they’d call him Fucky, not Fauci.” More

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      ‘He’s phoning it in’: why Biden is losing the voting rights fight

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      For months, Biden and other Democrats have raised alarm about efforts to restrict the vote. Republicans have succeeded nonetheless.Since January, Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Arkansas and Montana have all enacted new legislation that impose new barriers to voting. The successful Republican filibuster this week – which stalled the sweeping voting rights legislation, the For the People Act – only underscored how Democrats have failed to stop GOP efforts to curtail the vote.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterDemocrats have pledged the fight for voting rights is far from over, but activists told the Guardian it did not feel like Biden and Democrats were meeting the moment and treating the fight for voting rights with the urgency it deserved. “They’re checking the boxes,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, an advocacy group that is focused on mobilizing Black voters. “They’re not acting like we are facing an existential crisis. That’s the problem. It’s from the top down,” added Albright, who is currently on a multi-state bus tour across the south to raise awareness about the need for voting protections.After the bill stalled this week, the White House this week made a clear escalation of its efforts on voting rights. Biden announced he is embarking on a nationwide voting rights tour to highlight the threat of new GOP laws. “I’m going to be going around the country, making the case to the American people that this isn’t just about [showing identification] or being able to give someone water in line, this is about who is able to judge whether your vote gets counted,” he said at the White House on Thursday.The justice department also announced Friday that it was filing a major voting rights case challenging a sweeping new voting law in Georgia, one of the biggest voting cases the department has filed in recent years.The suit is a “step in the right direction,” said Albright, and would signal to other states that efforts to restrict voter access would not be tolerated. But Democrats have a narrow window to pass legislation. In August, state lawmakers will begin the once-per-decade process of redrawing US House and other state legislative districts, a procedure Republicans are poised to use to wipe out Democrats’ majority in the US House. The For the People Act would curb excessive manipulation of district lines for partisan gain, and if it isn’t in place by August, Republicans would be free to freely gerrymander districts.“The Republicans, they’re putting everything to stop it. I need that to be matched with the same kind of passion and commitment and to be vocal,” said LaTosha Brown, the other co-founder of Black Voters Matter. “I have not seen the kind of response that makes me believe they’re seeing this as a do-or-die moment for American democracy.”The problem isn’t that Biden isn’t paying attention, the activists say. The president issued a series of modest, but potentially consequential, executive orders expanding voting rights in March. He has appointed some of the country’s top voting rights lawyers to the upper echelons of the Justice Department, which recently announced it was doubling the number of attorneys focused on voting rights issues. And he has a White House adviser focused on voting rights.Biden has also been unsparing in his criticism of Republican efforts to make it harder to vote, ripping the efforts as “sick,” “un-American,” and “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”Still, some think Biden so far has failed to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to treat the issue as an emergency, said Ezra Levin, the founder of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots group.“He’s phoning it in,” Levin said. “We’ll see what the public actions look like. We’ll see how overwhelming the campaign is. So far we’ve seen basically no action, so any action is an improvement.”While the White House has highlighted its public commitment to voting rights, some advisers privately don’t think the GOP-backed rules will be as big a boon to Republicans as some fear, according to The Atlantic. Advisers privately see infrastructure as a better political winning issue for Biden, the Associated Press reported.“Recently, I’ve been encouraged to see him name voting rights as a priority, but at this point, words simply aren’t enough. We have heard more about a watered-down, bipartisan infrastructure bill than we have about how the White House will help House Democrats save our ailing democracy,” Mondaire Jones, a Democratic congressman from New York, said in a statement.“So we need action with the urgency that this crisis demands.”Brown, the Black Voters Matter activist, said Biden and Democrats in Washington should emulate Texas Democrats, who last month walked out of the state legislature, denying GOP lawmakers a quorum needed to pass legislation. Even though the legislature will reconvene in a special session next month and likely ultimately pass the bill, Republicans have already walked back some of the most damaging provisions. The maneuver also offered a jolt of energy and a symbolic win for Democrats after months.Biden has shown some flashes of upping the stakes. In April, he caught many off guard when he endorsed the idea of Major League Baseball moving its All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to Georgia’s new voting law. MLB did just that days later, offering some of the firmest consequences to Republicans to date for a voting law.Earlier this month, Biden also appeared to fire a shot at two moderate Democrats in the senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two of the staunchest defenders of the filibuster, saying there were “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.” The White House quickly walked back the comments, saying Biden was not talking about the two senators.But when Biden gave a speech to Congress earlier this year, he only mentioned voting rights briefly, towards the end of his remarks. “If I’m your opposition, and I tell you something’s important to me, and then I only give it 30 seconds, how seriously are you going to take me?,” Albright said.If Biden and Democrats were ultimately unable to pass voting rights legislation, Brown said, it would be “devastating” to Black voters, who not only played a big role in getting Biden to the White House, but also helped Democrats flip two Georgia US senate seats in January.“The message that it sends is that they’re not willing to go hard to deliver the things that we were expecting when we went out to vote for them and we risked our lives to do so,” Albright said. “The message that they’re sending is that they’re OK with a little bit of Jim Crow.” More

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      ‘Republicans are defunding the police’: Fox News anchor stumps congressman

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      The Fox News anchor Chris Wallace made headlines of his own on Sunday, by pointing out to a senior Republican that he and the rest of his party recently voted against $350bn in funding for law enforcement.“Can’t you make the argument that it’s you and the Republicans who are defunding the police?” Wallace asked Jim Banks, the head of the House Republican study committee.The congressman was the author of a Fox News column in which he said Democrats were responsible for spikes in violent crime.“There is overwhelming evidence,” Banks wrote, “connecting the rise in murders to the violent riots last summer” – a reference to protests over the murder of George Floyd which sometimes produced looting and violence – “and the defund the police movement. Both of which were supported, financially and rhetorically, by the Democratic party and the Biden administration.”Joe Biden does not support any attempt to “defund the police”, a slogan adopted by some on the left but which remains controversial and which the president has said Republicans have used to “beat the living hell” out of Democrats.On Fox News Sunday, Banks repeatedly attacked the so-called “Squad” of young progressive women in the House and said Democrats “stigmatised” law enforcement and helped criminals.“Let me push back on that a little bit,” Wallace said. “Because [this week] the president said that the central part in his anti-crime package is the $350bn in the American Rescue Plan, the Covid relief plan that was passed.”Covid relief passed through Congress in March, under rules that meant it did not require Republican votes. It did not get a single one.Asked if that meant it was “you and the Republicans who are defunding the police”, Banks dodged the question.Wallace said: “No, no, sir, respectfully – wait, sir, respectfully … I’m asking you, there’s $350bn in this package the president says can be used for policing …“Congressman Banks, let me finish and I promise I will give you a chance to answer. The president is saying cities and states can use this money to hire more police officers, invest in new technologies and develop summer job training and recreation programs for young people. Respectfully, I’ve heard your point about the last year, but you and every other Republican voted against this $350bn.”Turning a blind eye to Wallace’s question, Banks said: “If we turn a blind eye to law and order, and a blind eye to riots that occurred in cities last summer, and we take police officers off the street, we’re inevitably going to see crime rise.”Wallace asked if Banks could support any gun control legislation. Banks said that if Biden was “serious about reducing violent crime in America”, he should “admonish the radical voices in the Democrat [sic] party that have stigmatised police officers and law enforcement”.Despite working for Republicans’ favoured broadcaster, Wallace is happy to hold their feet to the fire, as grillings of Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy have shown.He has also attracted criticism, for example for failing to control Trump during a chaotic presidential debate last year which one network rival called “a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck”.Last year, Wallace told the Guardian: “I do what I do and I’m sitting there during the week trying to come up with the best guests and the best show I possibly can and I’m not sitting there thinking about how do we fit in some media commentary.“We’re not there to try to one-up the president or any politician.” More