Jennifer Foster

As Twitter followers read Tuesday night, I happened to be watching Rachel Maddow’s show while returns in the Massachusetts special Senate election were coming in.

It was delicious fun.

I usually don’t watch Maddow. OK, I never watch Maddow. But I do occasionally try. I find that I can usually make it about a segment—maybe less, depending on the topic—before I just have to get rid of it. I can’t stand her disdainful, sardonic approach to any person or policy that isn’t uberliberal.

Such was the care Tuesday night. I was at the gym on an elliptical machine, and the folks on either side of me were watching the Food Network and—inexplicably, because American Idol was on—some unidentifiable infomercial. So there I was, watching Maddow and steaming, not only from the workout but from listening to her mouth. Ugh.

I actually changed the channel during one commercial break, but Hannity was on Fox, and CNN had Paul Begala. Double ugh. So it was back to Maddow.

As the next segment opened, Maddow mocked Brown (After showing a clip of his line about driving a truck, she said, “I have a truck, too, but I don‘t necessarily think that means you should vote for me.“ I thought, hey! And I thought I wouldn’t agree with Maddow on anything.) and launched into a diatribe about him (he’s JUST a state senator, etc.), how it was inconceivable that anyone would vote for him based on the fact that he was a one-issue candidate. He has pledged to kill health care reform, she said. He believed Barack Obama’s mother was unmarried when she had him (“Scott Brown, the ‘Obama‘s-mother-secretly-no-married’ candidate in today‘s Senate race,“ she said) and had posed for Cosmo in the 1980s, she said, smirking all the way through it as the centerfold was displayed on the screen.

Here was the quote:

Awkward also for the family values mantle is that Mr. Brown, before running for this U.S. Senate seat, was probably best known as the conservative Massachusetts politician who had posed nude in “Cosmo,” in 1982, as winner of that year‘s sexiest man contest.

Now, for the awkward segue to Mr. Brown‘s support from the “tea bag the liberal Dems before they tea bag you” folks.  Mr. Brown‘s campaign has received at least $348,000 in just the past couple weeks from the Our Country Deserves Better PAC.  The folks behind the tea party express bus tour.

And then, immediately after that:

I just watched the clip again as I was putting it up on the blog. It was just as devilishly delightful the second time around. Look at Maddow’s face at 0:37. That is priceless.

What followed what an incredible exchange between Maddow and Chris Matthews—yes, that Chris Matthews—who tried to reason with Maddow on the obvious: that there was real voter anger, real sentiment driving Brown’s election and Democrats avoid it at their own peril. She went on to try to say that Massachusetts really isn’t that blue (um, right) and that the argument against a giant new government program—which is that the country can’t afford the giant government programs we already have—is a straw man.

Let’s put it this way: Matthews was the reasonable one in this debate. He sounded like a true moderate.

You’ve got to hand this to Maddow: She may be an unabashed, unapologetic unreasonable liberal, through and through, but she is consistent, even in the face of an extraordinary defeat like a GOP win in blue, blue Massachusetts.

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