In the off-camera chatter before CNN’s Reliable Sources this morning, Howard Kurtz said that Bernie Goldberg’s publicists were calling media outlets all over before Donny Deutsch’s show was aired.
I had heard that they were giddy about the way Deutsch’s show went and well they should be, for it only garnered him more publicity.
In the heat of the moment, as Bernie was apparently blowing a gasket, Linda Stasi turned to me and said that she thought it was all just his publicity stunt. I shrugged and said I doubted that, silly me; I said he was just a little too far off: “What’s the frequency, Bernie?” But I think Linda was right: He used it to get back onto Fox — on O’Reilly, no less — and onto Rush and into the Washington Times, not to mention on TownHall. It sure beats hawking a book at a time in Coral Gables. It was a brilliantly calculated move. And it’s working. So good for Bernie. Capitalism is what makes America great. And it’s not screwed up.
Bernie — and Bill and Rush — still try to play the victims, the underdogs, the little guys fighting them big, bad ol’ liberals. What’s amazing is that they can still pull it off. Look at Bernie’s own list and you see a bunch of losers: Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky haven’t gotten us out of Iraq; Al Franken and Janeane Garolao are nowhere next to Rush and Bill; Dan Rather’s all but unemployed (and Mary Mapes is); Howard Stern has been forced off the air; Phil Donahue defines has-been…. The conservatives are in power, solidly in power, and yet they still hold to the M.O. that got them into power: playing outsider, victim, paranoid.
But it still works. It sells books.
