Mick Mulvaney drew the short straw in the Trump White House for Sunday’s Meet The Press. The good natured Chuck Todd was on assignment. So the Management and Budget Director had to deal with Andrea Mitchell. She can face down her guest with a dentist’s precision: looking for that tangle of jittery nerves just below the surface waiting to erupt.

Mick had a gig up in the GOP Congress before Trump stashed him over at OMB. A big move up in the food chain of power. So he knows all the slights of hands when it comes to talking about the nation’s finances.

Economic policy and forecasting is all that cut and dry stuff left to the big shot bankers. So so far no one’s really taken note when Mick was telling Andrea that the New Normal we are operating in today is going to be going on and on forever and ever. The OMB Director’s New Normal Economics states that for the rest of time the United States is never going to achieve more than 3 percent annual growth.

Probably this means the nation is doomed to buying all it’s goods from China and Vietnam for generations to come.

While the infrastructure around us crumbles under the weight of rotted out federal planning agencies.

This is the same Mick Mulvaney from the Trump Administration that is toying with the idea of shutting down NBC. Taking away that NBC Broadcasting License.

Last week was a civics lesson by MSNBC commentators noting that what the autocrats and despots around the world do from the start is to discredit –  then abolish – the free press. FOX News has taught Trump and Company just how to go about doing just that.

Andrea turned from economics to the goings on down in Alabama. Mick snarled when asked how credible the Judge Roy Moore little girl molestation accusations are: “I laugh every time I come on networks like this.”

Mick Mulvaney says he’s so busy running OMB here in Washington that he’s not had time to look at “specifics.” And says Andrea Mitchell has only made her judgement on the matter based on her “political point of view.”

Andrea would have none of it: “Not because of a political persuasion at all,” she said with just a dash of reportorial astonishment. “I have no political axe to grind here other than to ask you whether you believe they are credible.”

So then it was left only for the OMB Director to recite the carefully crafted GOP party line he was sent to deliver to the Sunday news shows: “I believe that the folks who vote in the Alabama election are gonna ultimately decide that. And that’s the right folks to make those decisions.”

This is the thing. When Mick Mulvaney is in studio across from Andrea Mitchell sitting there in the Meet The Press anchor chair he just sees the shinny  bright lights. The cameras. And this old work horse of the National Broadcasting Company. He’s in the same company with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who flips Andrea Mitchell off with his backside as he charges past her over at the State Department.

It never occurs to these power guys the long service Andrea Mitchell has given not so much to the National Broadcasting Company. But to the country. And along the way she has been the confidant of Secretaries of State and Heads of State.

And the regular folks, too.

All of no consequence to all those little people crawling around the Trump White House.

Washington
November 20, 2017