The revolving door between Democratic campaign headquarters and MSNBC continued with the news that former host Karen Finney is returning to official employment under Hillary Clinton as a spokesperson and communications adviser.
Before her MSNBC tenure, she served as Democratic National Committee communications director from 2005 to 2009, and she most recently was a senior fellow at left-wing media watchdog Media Matters. As an MSNBC contributor and briefly the anchor of a weekend show, Disrupt, Finney was already peddling Democratic talking points under the guise of informed political analysis. Her role, not unlike most MSNBC guests, was to melodramatically attack Republicans and made frequently aggressive and even racially charged remarks to that end.
Finney drew criticism for derisively referring to "those crazy crackers on the Right" engaging in "hateful language" in 2013. She also said African American Republican Herman Cain was accepted by the GOP because "they think he's a black man who knows his place," and she once stated Republican governance was akin to apartheid because it was about "separating people."
She's just as charming when trying to make the tired "War on Women" or "War on the Poor" meme stick, saying on multiple shows that Republican legislatures were "redefining rape" and "letting women die" and once making a straight-faced argument that a budget plan by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would put a woman in her grave by her mid-3os.
It's a good guess that Finney and her MSNBC compatriots would be mortified if a Republican talking head said they'd like to punch Barack Obama in the nose for telling lies. It was curious then that she said the same thing about Romney in the wake of his convincing victory over Obama in the first 2012 presidential debate.
Finney made another strange remark about Romney in 2013 as the IRS targeting scandal broke, wondering aloud why Romney didn't make an issue of it on the campaign trail. It did not dawn on her that no one outside the agency knew the full extent of the targeting in 2012, but she doubled down when confronted online.
Finney goes way back with Clinton, having served as traveling press secretary on her successful U.S. Senate campaign in 2000. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd called out her obvious conflict of interest about Clinton's email scandal on the show March 15, just weeks before her hire by Clinton was announced.
"You may end up working for her campaign, probably full disclosure, we don’t know," Todd said. "I mean, a lot of Democrats may end up working for her campaign."
Finney frowned a moment before smiling and saying, "Trying to get me in trouble here."
She proceeded to say Clinton "deserved credit" for doing a press conference about the controversy and also complained that Jeb Bush has also had email problems.
As National Review's Jim Geraghty pointed out, how often does a serious program book a guest to analyze someone who's literally about to be paying them?