Melnik Megwawa Award Candidate

To channel my inner Andrew Sullivan, I'm going to attempt to create at least one - if not more - award honoring high/low points in journalism. This one is called the Melnik Megwawa Award, named after one of the funnier scenes in Cheers history. I cannot find the exact specifics of the scene, but as I can recall, before the 1984 election, Cliff Claven researched the numerical values of the letters of the names of all past presidents. His conclusion was, based on his research, that the only possible candidate that could defeat Reagan would have to be named Melnik Megwawa.

So the Megwawa Award will recognize journalistic statements or predictions that have absolutely no basis in reality or logic.

Today's candidate: First Read at MSNBC. As they list off who they think were the winners and losers of the stimulus bill debate, a couple of the winners stood out to me.

...the Republican Party (which demonstrated unity after its big losses in November), and No.2 House Republican Eric Cantor (who raised his profile during the debate, although he took a BIG hit yesterday for that profane AFSCME video his office released).

First off, the easy one to knock down is Cantor. Never mind the fact that we found that video almost two months ago, and it was intended as a joke. Cantor actually wanted to use this ad as an insult to union members (which makes him a dipshit in addition to being reprehensible). I would say that the past few weeks has proven Cantor to be an idiotic, clueless hack, who is capable of doing nothing more than spouting off goofy right-wing talking points...but that was already established.

But the republican party being a big winner because they displayed party unity? I don't think anyone ever doubted that they were unified - the smaller a group gets, the more likely they are to all agree. Perhaps it would have been better if they actually made an effort to put together a constructive bill, instead of trying to bring the whole thing down, or worse yet propose a completely different bill that had absolutely no stimulus provisions whatsoever.

You know who else displays unity? Lemmings. Maybe that will replace the elephant as the new party logo.

(As an aside, one of the authors listed on the post was Chuck Todd. I'm getting more than a bit worried about him lately. The press conference question that seemed to come right out of the right-wing playbook was bad enough, but this is just inane. I really liked him during the election season; he was very insightful, candid, and didn't hold back on his observations. I'm hoping he doesn't get sucked into being one of the MSM/conventional wisdom types. That would be a shame.)