MSNBC Touts 'Forensic Colonoscopy' of the 'Vichy Republicans' with Unhinged Frank Rich

January 14th, 2020 12:33 PM

On January 9, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell lunged to promote the latest New York magazine screed by former New York Times drama critic and columnist Frank Rich, who insisted Trump's supporters were "Vichy Republicans," like Hitler's collaborators in France during World War II: 

Trump’s collaborators look less like the corrupt government bureaucrats and hacks of All the President’s Men and more like the traitorous elites who wittingly or idiotically enabled Hitler in the 1930s.

The notion of Vichy Republicans is hardly hyperbole. [!]

...Many of these Hitler enablers had elaborate rationalizations for their actions that mirror those of Trump’s highest-profile shills today.

Rich's extreme Trump Derangement Syndrome played itself out in a loooooong 5,116 word rant in Tuesday's New York magazine in which he fantasizes vengeance upon Trump supporters, "What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies?" On MSNBC, Rich went even further and even promised that vengeance will be applied to the "children and their grandchildren" of those who support Trump who "will be implicated" as you can see in the video below.

O'Donnell began the segment with his own favorite passage: "Once Trump has vacated the Oval Office and possibly for decades thereafter, his government like any other deposed strongman`s will be subjected to a forensic colonoscopy to root out buried crimes, whether against humanity or the rule of law or both. With time, everything will come out - it always does."

Rich's "reckoning" revenge fantasy kicks in right away in the second paragraph of his extended rage: 

John Kennedy, the Louisiana senator who parrots Vladimir Putin’s talking points in his supine defense of Trump, acts as if there will never be a reckoning. While he has no relation to the president whose name he incongruously bears, his every craven statement bespeaks a confidence that history will count him among the knights of the buffet table in the gilded Mar-a-Lago renovation of Camelot. He is far from alone.

...Heedless lapdogs like Kennedy, Devin Nunes, and Lindsey Graham are acting now as if there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come eventually, whatever happens in the near future, and Judgment Day could arrive sooner than they think. That judgment will be rendered by an ever-more demographically diverse America unlikely to be magnanimous toward cynical politicians who prioritized pandering to Trump’s dwindling all-white base over the common good.

Yup! That sure does sound like a revenge fantasy. What ever happened to the left's lectures several years ago about a "civil discourse?"

The Mueller Report uncovered NO evidence of  Trump campaign collusion with Putin in the 2016 election. However, the Horowitz IG report did reveal FISA abuses by the FBI to illegally spy on the Trump campaign.  But Rich chooses to ignore such proven abuses of power by those who oppose Trump while fantasizing about a "reckoning" (revenge) upon those whose political "crime" is to support Trump.