Chuck Todd's recent ascension to host of NBC's Meet The Press has generated a lot of attention to what had been considered the crown jewel of Sunday morning public affairs television until the past few years. Not only does a new host bring new juice to the moribund franchise, but new energy in its programming choices would be welcome as well.
So while putting on air a 73-year-old white U.S. Senator on the show hardly sounds revolutionary, it sort of is when that 73-year-old Senator happens to be Bernie Sanders, Congress's only self-described socialist, who was invited onto the MTP studios for the first time since being elected as a Representative from Vermont in 1990.
Sanders has been making some noises about running for president in 2016, where he clearly would run to Hillary Clinton's left in the Democratic primaries, if he were to run as a Democrat (he's currently an Independent).
"I don't know if Hillary Clinton is running," Sanders replied when Todd asked if he was aiming at Clinton when he talks about the American people's frustrations with both Democrats and Republicans. "I don't know what she's running on. But this is what I do know. The middle class in this country is collapsing," Sanders said. "There is profound anger at the greed on Wall Street and corporate America- anger at the political establishment; anger at the media establishment. The American people want really change, and I’ve been taken on the big money interests and the special interests all my political life."
Sanders took a couple of shots at the Koch Brothers and the hundreds of millions of dollars they're spending to support Republicans in this year's midterm election, claiming that the Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010 "will go down in history as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever. I think it is opening up the road to oligarchy in the United States of America, where the billionaires like the Koch brothers.."
If it wasn't startling enough to see Sanders on Sunday morning television, what about Berkeley Representative Barbara Lee appearing on CNN's Reliable Sources show with another relatively new Sunday morning talk-show host, Brian Stelter?
In additional to being one of the most liberal members in the House of Representatives, Lee stands out as being the only member in the House to oppose the 2001 authorization for George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks.
Stelter introduced Lee by saying that with the U.S. about to intervene again militarily in Iraq (and for the first time) in Syria, there doesn't appear to be many voices of opposition opposed to war on the broadcast and cable airwaves.
"At least my experience has been ...very seldom are progressives called (by) people who have an opposing point of view to whatever the current thought is and the current polling data is showing," Lee told Stelter.
Although Congress appears poised to vote on a resolution regarding the U.S. taking on ISIS in the Middle East, there had been reports last week the White House was considering previous resolutions approved by Congress sufficient to go to war without such a vote.
That's why Lee said she stands by her vote in 2011, the only vote against going to war in Afghanistan.
"13 years ago, after the horrific attacks of 9/11, a resolution came forward which to me was a blank check. It was very broad. It was not defined. It was not a resolution that quite frankly I could support, and it’s a resolution 13 years later that’s been used over and over and over again for bombing campaigns, for domestic spying. The Congressional Research service gave us a list of over 30 times it’s been used. So it was a blank check."