THOSE APRIL FOOLS ON DISPLAY.

Here are a couple of goodies from a cold winter's worth of Sunday shows.  We start with a Meet the Press transcript from February 10, where, as is often the case, the first topic, last topic, and only topic, was the long-anticipated Mueller report.  (I exaggerate, but only slightly.)  On occasion, even the pols, here a Colorado Democrat, want to say Enough, already.

SENATOR MICHAEL BENNET:

So I'd say first of all, the country, and I don't mean this just as a political statement, I think it's true, I don't think the country is anywhere nearly as divided as Washington D.C. is. I think the country is sick and tired of Washington yapping about stuff and not actually doing anything. My state's a third Democratic, a third Republican, and a third Independent. And people notice that we've gotten nothing done over the last ten years, except, except for the Affordable Care Act when the Democrats were in charge, and this terrible tax cut, when Donald Trump has been in charge. That's a pretty sorry record when you think about what the Chinese are doing. And I think we need to judge people, candidates and elected officials, based on the outcomes, based on the results that they actually get, and not on what they, you know, the press conferences that they have.

That's still judging Washington by Washington standards.  The so-called Affordable Care Act was two lies for the price of one, and one way to understand the midterm elections in 2010 and 2014 and the split decision in 2012 was an electorate sending a message that Washington not doing anything might be preferable to Washington Doing Something.

To say that on a Sunday show, though, might be the best way of freeing up all future Sunday mornings to go sailing!

Two weeks later, moderator Chuck Todd elicits this from a former secretary of Homeland Security.  (Scroll down.  They're still anticipating the Mueller Report and ankle-biting Our President and assorted Republicans.)

The remark comes in the wake of a news story about an angry Coast Guard man who was arrested before he carried out some sort of mass mayhem.  The Christchurch mosque shootings occurred more recently, but whether it's a plot broken up by sharp police action, or a plot carried out, somehow, the rhetoric of Our President is to blame.

CHUCK TODD:

So you're basically saying, because the president doesn't condemn this, and because the president doesn't want to take the lead on this, there's not much government can do, until he does?

SEC. JEH JOHNSON:

I think it's incumbent upon all our leadership, across the spectrum, to lower the levels of our -- to raise the levels of our civil discourse, discourage violence, call it out wherever it might exist on the political spectrum.

That might be so.

Would it hurt for the people who do the Beltway shows to attach less importance to what goes on inside the Beltway, to refrain from making everything political, heck, for Chuck Todd to be less obviously a truculent baiter of Republicans?