Enter
see what his speech is like tomorrow night.”
Terrific. Cutter and Gingrich
both agree that “Syria...hoo, boy, I
don’t know, seems pretty tough.”
The general verdict on Twitter
was that it is up to the show’s
other two hosts, S.E. Cupp and
Van Jones, to rescue this endeavor from suckdom. They
might be up to the task. Cupp’s
gotten a lot of cable teevee panel
show seasoning as a host of MSNBC’s The Cycle, and could be
hungering for an opportunity to
free herself from the conf ines of
the show’s strictly-enforced collegiality. And it’s a genuine surprise that Jones was included in
this project, because he is a rarity on cable news panel shows
— a bona fide liberal. By which I
mean he is genuinely to the left
of most “liberals approved by
the Democratic donor class” who
are the more traditional features
of these kinds of shows.
What Cupp and Jones should
do, in fact, is shrug off the “left
versus right” paradigm of the
show and see themselves as
partners in the battle against the
weaksauce hackery and flackery
to which Cutter and Gingrich are
limited. They have the oppor-
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IN ANGST
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09.15.13
tunity to be really interesting,
argue their points of view with
electricity, and even challenge
the show’s set dynamic.
But in this, I am probably being way more optimistic than is
warranted by the threadbare junk
that was allowed to air Monday
night. In fact, the best thing I can
say about the debut of Crossfire is
that it may find the same success
that Liz Lemon’s Dealbreakers
Both hosts... managed
to ask their guests the same
question twice, allowing them
ample opportunities to keep
repeating their positions, over
and over again.”
show found in the universe of 30
Rock — as something that can be
played on the teevees in the background of other teevee shows.
So, if in two years time, you
see the new Crossfire playing
on the monitors of HBO’s The
Newsroom, this will be an extraordinary achievement because
it means that there will still be
enough people watching The
Newsroom to keep it on
the air in 2015.