I was almost startled by how un-charming she was on Meet the Press yesterday. Keep in mind I don’t normally find her charming, but she went so deep into the negative yesterday it was amazing. There’s nothing particularly wrong with having prepared lines before you do national TV, but this was both so obviously a bit of schtick:

And look at us, and we’re torturing people and we’re outsourcing torture. The administration is trying to throw journalists in jail and basically trying to replace the whole press crew with ringers, including male escorts. I mean, even Nixon hated the press, but he never tried to actually do an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” thing with them. So as Tom has pointed out, it’s a Pandora’s box. There are good spirits and evil spirits that we’ve unleashed.

The reason you can tell it’s schtick is that it’s not very good analysis. The torture thing is a fair point. But the bit about “trying to put journalists in jail” is a remarkable stretch of the facts and the connection between Gannon and the White House is the stuff of lefty-blog fantasy. In other words, she went in with a line that she thought was more important — because she thought it was funny — than she thought it was true. It was in fact neither very funny nor very true and when delivered in that Eric-Alterman-twang not very effective either.