The channel is a lazy intern’s dream. Recently, a guest called Tim Wise nonchalantly announced that Republicans have “essentially gone in as a white-nationalist, Afrikaner, Boer party.” It’s all there, clear as day. Just rip from the Internet and upload. Bingo! One gets the uncomfortable feeling that the minds behind the programming are so strongly wedded to the cartoon impression of what they believe Fox News to be — sorry, what they believe the “FAUX NEWS ECHO CHAMBER!” to be — that they cannot imagine running a television station without emulating it. MSNBC, it seems, is a reaction against a Fox that never really existed — a progressive version of the How Utterly Ridiculous Can One Become Before the Commercial Break? game that has long been played more devotedly in the fever swamps of the Left than by the conservatives they like to denounce…

The occasional flourishes of Rush Limbaugh are one thing. But Rush Limbaugh does not get to interview the most powerful man in the world, nor to conduct presidential debates. Matthews does. And that’s important, because MSNBC does not regard itself as either a comedy station or as a partisan tool, but as the home of the smart set. There is something vaguely embarrassing about the way in which the channel’s younger contributors openly self-identify as “wonks” and encourage their audience members to join them in marking their own brilliance with the Twitter hashtag “#nerdland.” But self-identify they do. “Lean Forward” and all that.

To those who watch every day, the descent must have been almost imperceptible. But for casual viewers such as myself, it has been dramatic. Even between the election last year and the shutdown in September, the station has changed considerably — moving, in the amusing vernacular of its critics, from being “MSDNC” — or a thinly disguised cheerleader for the Democratic party — to “MSLSD,” a fully psychedelic exposition of the grad-school-progressive id.