Hoping Luke is grateful to Dad on his day.

Russert Sr. was a wanker who reveled in faux working class cred, but Chris Matthews is hands down the king of this sort of bullshit.

Is there a better example of the quote: “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they’ve hit a triple,” then Little Luke?

More then a few people would benefit from having little access to family money and connections as they had to feed, clothe and shelter themselves for a year or two. Russert’s friends at NBC would have been doing a service making Luke work off camera in say the Phoenix affliate trying to produce “results”. Not just to their viewers, but in cleaning up another job that Tim apparently half assed – raising his kid. Luke has obviously been spoiled, but perhaps a bout with the real world might have stripped some of that rot away. Too bad for everyone.

If ol’ Tim hadn’t died so suddenly, Li’l Luke would still be sweating it out in the streets wondering if his weekly stipend would be automatically deposited before Friday, or if his Trust fund was getting an ROI that would yield him enough to pay cash for this year’s Audi.

Oh, Snap!

“The news media is a results-oriented business.”

Oh, please. In his case, the “result” is pablum to separate the commercial breaks. He’s a second-generation proven corporatist PR ass-kisser the suits can rely on not to go off the reservation and develop a conscience or start recognizing inconvenient facts.

Actually the news media is a results-oriented business. A majority of the viewing population are brainwashed and hypnotized enough by Village propaganda so as to do things like elect George W Bush as President. Twice.

Mission accomplished.

“The news media is a results-oriented business.”

Having wankers like him in front of a camera is one of the results toward which it’s oriented. Actual news? Maybe, as long as it doesn’t upset The Very Serious People.

“I don’t think a company like NBC would pay me if I wasn’t qualified and wasn’t able to produce on this level…”

Being qualified to spew the news on the TV apparently doesn’t include having mastered the use of the subjunctive mood in counter-factual conditional clauses: “weren’t qualified…weren’t able.” If Tevye, a milkman sweating it out in the streets of a runaway shtetl dream, can do it, so can Luke.

Youse a farce, Luke.

Actually, I take that back. Luke Russert is perhaps the most shining example of the ‘American Meritocracy’ to come along since little Billy Kristol and the Koch Brothers.

TBogg is really Bill Katt?

In Feenix he’d have been competing with JD Hayworth and other local talent – like Miss Palin. I doubt if he’d have made it. There’s a station in Prescott tho that could have used him….

Isn’t it funny how these kinds of kids pretend not to understand how one hand washes the other?
They downplay the powerful accelerative effect having family connections has on their career trajectory. And they pretend not to know that part of that effect is to nurture junior long enough in the position that he can turn around and be taken “seriously” as someone with experience.

I recall Stella McCartney saying something similar. She pooh poohed the boost of who her Daddy was in her design career because, while he had gotten her foot in the door, it was purely on her own merits that she had stayed in the game. Like someone is gonna risk their own career by coming down hard on Daddy’s little darling.

They believe this.
They have to, to keep playing the game.
In turn, they will pull strings and open doors for their kids and put up with the rich slacker children of other movers and shakers who want to break into their own fields.

Of course, this kind of behavior will have absolutely no effect on the decline of Western civilization.

Of course, this kind of behavior will have absolutely no effect on the decline of Western civilization.

Well, it hasn’t so far… Inbred chinless twits have been handed the reins of power by Daddy for the span of recorded history. I think there is probably a correlation to the periods of rise and fall with what percentage are less twitty than the rest.

Luke is like a knife, baby, edgy and dull,
he’ll cut a six-inch valley through the middle of your soul

I haven’t done any in depth research but when you think about it, many of the things we take for granted as being major social goods got their start in the nineteenth century, a period when, after a few centuries of the aristos holding all the power and proudly doing none of the work, self made millionaires were able to not only hobnob with those in power, but also affect policy.

It wasn’t so long ago that one of the movers and shakers could say with a straight face, “to whom much has been given, much is expected”. I suppose there is still the possibility of “from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations” but maybe the kids are smart enough to hire help (hello congress critters!) to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Luke,

“Media” is a plural noun. You should write “The news media are …”

I guess knowledge of English is not a requirement if your name is Russert.

“Nepotism is OK, as long as you keep it in the family.”

Oh, and what Neal said about the subjunctive!

Russert says. “The news media is a results-oriented business. I don’t think a company like NBC would pay me if I wasn’t qualified and wasn’t able to produce on this level…named Russert

Fixed.

In turn, they will pull strings and open doors for their kids and put up with the rich slacker children of other movers and shakers who want to break into their own fields.

I always wondered why they didn’t assail George W. Bush as an unqualified hack from the get-go, much less why they carried on with pathetic charade in the face of all available evidence… and this explanation makes far more sense than any other I’ve heard.

Legacy-hire, please…

We need a “Trust Fund Baby Protection Act”…

tax the motherfuckers at least 99% to protect us from their fucking lazy “since 1985″ drivel.

Russert was a huge part of the problem, but poor, poor Pumpkinhead’s heart would just burst if he heard this “a company like NBC would pay me if I wasn’t qualified” shit from his own son. Even he would say, “Bitch, please!”

~ Harry R. Sohl

Maybe Tim Russert’s “blue collarness” stems from his attendance at Ten Cent Beer Night.

Make that “stemmed”.

The kid just *looks* stupid. That’s what kills me. Jeez, give him a cushy job in the executive suite and keep his dumb-as-dirt pan away from the camera.

The degree to which NBC worships Little (Cheney-smegma-on-the-chin) Russ never ceases to amaze.

TBogg is Leroy The Masochist Smith.

Luke writes about what his father taught him in the Fathers Day issue of Parade:

1. Believe in yourself.
2. It’s OK to be scared. (Except by Clinton’s penis evidently)
3. Remember the little things

http://www.parade.com/news/2011/06/19-table-of-contents.html#.Tf-sxFuqgr4

I’ve yet to hear Little Luke say one sentence that wasn’t stunningly obvious and mundane. He has no insight into anything, probably because he has no experience with anything.

Agreed. What a vacuous vacuum of vacuity he is.

“I don’t think a company like NBC would pay me if I wasn’t qualified and wasn’t able to produce on this level…”

Sure sounds like Tim, Jr. picked up on this vibration. How sad is it that he needs to address it publicly? And, no, Luke, your only qualification is that your last name was spelled R-u-s-s-e-r-t. We can only hope that you don’t become the tool that your father was for the Republican Party.

Little Luke is the William Kristol of on-air network “talent’, or alternately the GW Bush of Broadcasting. Time to wheel out this classic quote on Repuke “meritocracy” that never gets old —

In the late 1990s Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. ‘I oppose it,’ Irving replied. ‘It subverts meritocracy.’

Yes, sweating it out since birth!

Obviously, YOU have NO IDEA how HARD it is to be born into a privileged life and get a cushy job with astronomical pay and no heavy lifting required. All us struggling lucky duckies just don’t appreciate how difficult it is to have everything so easy. And really, isn’t that one of Bruce’s perennial themes – sympathy and understanding for the poor, misunderstood winners in society?

Lil’ Luke is one tough mover and shanker, all right.
Hope his tattoos don’t run in the rain on those mean streets.

re Ragged Dick:

Please try to remember that Horatio Alger Stories are not stories of self-made men who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps etc., but are actually stories of luck befalling those who do a kindness to the aristocracy.

Ragged Dick is a good example; he rescued a nobleman’s son from drowning, and was thus staked by the nobleman in his endeavors thereon.

As you can see, there’s a certain irony in this–

Hate to spoil the good, clean resentment-filled fun here, but I read Sir Luke’s tag as ironic and slightly self-deprecating.

Really? You hate to do it? So… someone’s making you do it? You swore an oath to do it? Why exactly do you spoil the fun if you hate doing it so?

I ask because there are so many people who hate doing things — things that spoil the fun of others — but do them anyway, and I was just wondering what motivates these brave, tough-minded individuals in their lonely quest.