I'm glad someone besides me noticed that. He got tagged with being insane, but he had that huge grin on his face when he was done and looked to me like he was just having a lot of fun firing up his campaign team. In some ways it was his most likeable moment.
That was a case of the MSM going in the tank early and spiking Dean's campaign in favor of the sKerry one. In fact, that may have given them such a sense of their own invulnerability that they thought they could drive the general election as well. Too bad for them.
"That was a case of the MSM going in the tank early and spiking Dean's campaign in favor of the sKerry one."
Yes, you are right. Rathergate was rewarding, but those folks need to come down a bunch more pegs, they really don't do their constitutionally mandated jobs at all. Not the real mainstreamers, anyway. All the respectable opinion journals, right & left, do a better job.
I'll never forget when Steve Forbes was running for Pres. the first (only?) time, and a return to the Gold Standard was part of his platform. He was on one of the insipid morning shows and all they did was basically laugh at him over it. Didn't ask him to explain it, or why he thought it was a good idea, nothing! Here was this millionaire, publisher of a well respected business magazine, with this BIG idea in economics, and all the two dopes interviewing him did was treat him like a boob. I supported Forbes, although I figured he was a no-chancer (unfairly, like Miracle Joe Lieberman, just not handsome enough to be President in the TV age), but it wasn't that I supported him that infuriated me so much. You are right, they see their role as one of manipulation, I guess that's a post-Watergate thing, not informing the public.
Those AM shows are particularly bad. The only reason I even saw the Forbes interview was that I got in a really bad (and long) jag of watching those shows during some really awful winters we had a few years ago. Thank goodness I can watch Fox or the Weather Channel should that ever happen again.