Rachel Maddow is my sweetie

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OK, today I am expressing unconditional love for Rachel Maddow. Not romantic love, of course, because I'm definitely not her type - she was named the Hottest Butch of 2009 by something called Sinclair Sexsmith's Top Hat Butches - but in a cozy and pure intellectual way. She has her own television program, "The Rachel Maddow Show" - great name - that comes right after "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" on MSNBC.

I like Olbermann because he was the first out-there liberal voice on cable television, both entertaining and combative, but I like Maddow better because, while entertaining, she is not overtly combative. In fact, she is unfailingly polite, particularly with those guests she disagrees with. She seems dedicated to restoring civility to public discourse, and lots of people, including people in power, appreciate that about her. No shouting matches on "The Rachel Maddow Show."

Also, she often begins her interviews by asking the guests whether her summary of the issues was correct. This is virtually unheard of in TV news, where the star of the show must, like the pope, always maintain the aura of infallibility.

Another thing in her favor: She's funny. She mocks right-wing ideas by making them seem silly, and she makes space for comic, or at least weird, news items on her show - what she calls "Holy Mackerel Stories." Another great occasional feature is "Talk Me Down," in which she chooses an issue that's making her crazy and asks an expert on the show to convince her that the sky is not, in fact, falling.

Occasionally, her sense of strategy fails her - she let Pat Buchanan spew his racist garbage for far too long without lobbing a pointed question back - but apparently Buchanan was kind to her when she was pretty much a nobody, and she seems like a loyal person, even to her political enemies. (Has it occurred to you that, at the moment, Republicans are pretty much a time suck, and maybe we should all just ignore them and get on with trying to figure out the extremely thorny problems facing the nation? They're not helping, on purpose, because they think helping would be bad politics. Jerks.)

She's a local girl, Castro Valley born and bred, so there's another plus. Here's a paragraph from her official biography: "Rachel has a doctorate in political science (she was a Rhodes Scholar) and a background in HIV/AIDS activism and prison reform. She shakes a mean cocktail, drives a bright red pickup, hates Coldplay, loves arguing with conservatives, spends a lot of money on AMTRAK tickets, and dresses like a first-grader."

During her activist phase, she was pretty much a community organizer, but she has been quoted as saying: "I have never and still don't think of myself as an Obama supporter, either professionally or actually."

For a long time, the sanity of our republic was kept together by Jon Stewart, which is pretty strange when you think about it, but true anyway. Somebody had to point out that the emperor had neglected to consult his wardrobe experts. Stewart was joined by Stephen Colbert and his jujitsu politics, which are classic bits of performance art but not exactly what we needed. But now we have Rachel Maddow - calm, kind of goofy, occasionally intense, very smart.

She's a genuine wonk (particularly on defense issues - her father is a former captain in the Air Force) and as close to a true intellectual as we're likely to get on cable TV. She may not be unbiased, but she's very careful with her facts. She's the one who traced the town hall disruptions back through several layers of corporate shells to lobbyists for the health care industry, and she has tried to shame the mainstream media into reporting on those links. These shout-downs are not spontaneous expressions of public outrage; they're a bullying tactic designed to prevent any reasonable discussion about health care reform.

She was also the only TV news show host, to my knowledge, to concentrate day after day on Sonia Sotomayor's judicial record as opposed to all the "wise Latina" nonsense. She wanted to know what kind of judge she'd be. Amazing! Why didn't anyone else think like that?

She's an out lesbian, the first one to host a news show, as far as I know, and that's a hopeful sign to those of us who think that the gay rights movement will win a lot of battles just by being more visible and not demonstrably an agent of Satan. And she looks like me - not exactly, of course, because she's 25 years younger and a woman - but she looks like the people I see every day. Her appearance and her sly grin are themselves an indication that the world has changed.

I've waited a long time for Rachel Maddow, and I'm glad she's arrived.