CBS News Gives Me the M-Ick
The hire implies that men like Mulvaney now represent the Republican Party’s least-crazy types.
It snowed in both Chicago and London today. Try as I might, there is no escape.
CBS News’ hiring of former acting T**** White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor has… not gone over well.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise – CBS News has long been considered a bastion of respectable journalism in contrast to the punditry that often takes center stage at its cable counterparts, while Mick Mulvaney and ‘respectable’ don’t come to mind together in the same sentence.
The Washington Post reported that the backlash was perhaps harshest at Mulvaney’s new workplace, where staffers were described as “embarrassed,” “frustrated,” and “baffled.”
But perhaps what appears most startling about the hire is the reasoning behind it, relayed by a recording of comments made by CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani to staffers:
“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms.”
The argument is unconvincing, if not dangerous.
While true that Democrats currently face a significant uphill battle in polling, it’s an awkward admission to make as a news organization that you’re actively seeking to curry favor with partisans. Not to mention hiring someone with such a poor political record.
By now I can only assume my poor British readers have given up on this article. ‘Who the hell is Mick Mulvaney and why does he sound like a King of the Hill character?’
Mulvaney served in South Carolina’s State House and Senate before being elected to the US House of Representatives in 2011. Yes, the former slave state and first state to vote to secede from the Union, that one. He spent much of his time in Congress crying about the deficit during the Obama administration as a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, even advocating for controversially shutting down the government rather than raise the country’s debt limit. But when T**** nominated him to direct the Office of Budget and Management, he oversaw an immense expansion of the very same deficit thanks to the administration’s simultaneous tax cuts and increases in spending. At the same time, the spending cuts he did advocate for included culling Meals on Wheels, the State Department, the EPA, SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid, and Social Security disability benefits.
Later, when T**** appointed him head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mulvaney sought to destroy the once-fierce financial regulator from within, submitting quarterly budget requests of $0.00.
Hypocrisy and malice aside (it’s the norm for his party – so nothing exactly remarkable), Mulvaney’s later tenure as T****’s Chief of Staff was dangerously adversarial. He blamed the media for ‘stoking coronavirus fears to take down T****’ and was closely involved in the Ukraine scandal that led to T****’s first impeachment (sidenote, imagine if this administration was still in power, and Russia invaded Ukraine while US military assistance to the country was being withheld unless they caved to T****’s personal political desires).
And beyond Mick’s actions, there is every indication that he is as ultra-conservative as they come. In July of 2016, Mulvaney spoke at a dinner held by the John Birch Society, the notorious far-right, conspiracy-peddling group that once spread that Dwight Eisenhower was "a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy".
CBS News’ hiring sets a terrible precedent: that former T**** administration officials can get prominent positions in the media that they themselves spent years maligning. It completely normalizes abnormal behaviors and beliefs, continuing America’s Overton window drift further and further to the right.
Most ex-T****s more commonly circulate on far-right channels, like Fox News, One American News Network, and Newsmax. Those outlets are dangerous enough in their spread of misinformation and propaganda, but it somehow feels even worse when it’s no longer contained to an ecosystem that many in the center and on the left don’t ever interact with.
To be fair, there have been many other right-wing commentators on major television outlets: for instance, Chris Christie walks a forever-narrowing line between being a T**** apologist and a T**** critic on ABC.
But this is more reminiscent of CNN’s hiring of Corey Lewandowski. The former T**** campaign manager received severance payments from the campaign while working at CNN, a campaign with whom he had also previously signed agreements that disallowed him from publicly disparaging T****. His tenure at the cable network included such gems as defending T**** for tweeting a horrendously antisemitic image and spreading birtherist theories on air.
CNN’s platforming of Lewandowski was as unacceptable then as CBS News’ platforming of Mulvaney is now. Except it’s made worse by 1) the higher standard the latter is typically held to, and 2) the fact that we’ve already learned just how dangerous it can be to give these men air in the lead-up to an election.
The ‘hiring representatives from both sides’ argument doesn’t work here, and doesn’t work, period. For one, the ‘other side’ has lost all semblance of truth and refuses to act in good faith. All the ‘reasonable’ Republicans are Democrats now, or at least independents. We already have Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt on MSNBC, and frankly there’s no reason to hear from anyone further to the right of the man who once thought picking Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP was a good idea (Schmidt later came to regret the decision and found The Lincoln Project to oppose T****, and Wallace, for her part, was against Palin from the start).
To me, the scariest thing is that by making this hire, it implies that men like Mulvaney now represent the Republican Party’s least-crazy types.
And for as ultra-conservative as Mulvaney is, that wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. Mulvaney at least condemned the January 6 insurrection, resigning from his post as special envoy to the administration on that very day. Most Republicans today either have continued their support for what occurred or have walked back statements they once made against the attack on the Capitol they were themselves inside.
But we can’t continue to be lulled into this constant moving of the goalposts. Mulvaney is himself beyond the ‘fringe’ of reasonable conservative political thought – his opinion shouldn’t be one that average Americans are regularly subjected to.
It’s the lowest of bars to maintain that just because someone isn’t in favor of treason doesn’t mean they have anything worth hearing on CBS News.
Photo by Gage Skidmore