‘If you really believe it, it’s not a lie’ — George Costanza

Credibility is hard earned but easily spent. By that metric, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is bankrupt. She went all in on Trump colluding with Russia and came up empty.

But there’s got to be collusion! There’s just got to be!

The magazine Vanity Fair is reporting that even the Never-Trump New York Times is bailing on Maddow’s show — not because her ratings are down (which they are, big time), but because she was too compromised, even for them. But “aren’t they in the same Trump-era boat?” asks Vanity Fair author Joe Pompeo (no relation to the secretary of state). 

Lawrence O’Donnell and CNN’s Don Lemon fall under the same fatwa, the author reports. Sean Hannity would as well, if a NY Times reporter would ever be invited on that Trumppity’s show.

Fox News could not resist piling on:

“Maddow long ago carved out her faux-intellectual paranoid niche, and she’s stuck in it,” said Cornell Law School professor and conservative blogger William A. Jacobson. 

Contrast and compare

Watergate versus Obama’s spying

Hero of her own novel

For pure, delightful bitchiness, here is National Review’s Rich Lowry: “For the past two years, Rachel Maddow has been a hero of her own spy-thriller. 

She has written, directed and starred in a hit production based on the unlikely premise of a prime-time cable TV show host unraveling the most dastardly plot in American history — one opening monologue at a time.

She covered the story with a consistent breathlessness. She took evident pleasure over even minor jail sentences for minor players. No proceeding related to the probe was too small for her long, involved explications. She did dramatic readings of courtroom transcripts. …

Pervading it all was the sense that she could see the deeper forces behind the headlines, she could discern the pattern in all the dots, and you could, too, as long as you paid close enough attention to her program. …

Only the story had a surprise twist at the end — she was completely wrong!

Our Rachel crying on air when she had to announce that Robert Mueller’s investigation found no collusion. 

Blaska’s bottom line: Will Rachel go the way of poor Ed Schultz, who tied himself to the Wisconsin Recall and went down with it? Say it with the Squire: “Fake News.”