John McLaughlin has lost his rough edges—and maybe even his marbles. No wonder the McLaughlin Group is the best damned talk-show on television

Every time I look at John McLaughlin, I see him in his underwear. A guy I used to know was a researcher for The McLaughlin Group, and he told me once in a hushed, anguished tone of entering the big boss's dressing room to deliver briefing files before a taping and finding him in his stocking feet and boxers, with pressed trousers hanging on the door. He found the image difficult to shake, and so have I.

Still, I find myself looking at McLaughlin a lot, even though his jowly, splotchy, bespectacled mug can be hard to find on TV these days. The Group is relegated to Saturday or Sunday afternoons in most markets, nestled somewhere on the dial between Ron Popeil's astonishing machines and college football. There was a time when McLaughlin was, as his bio puts it, a "preeminent news personality." He single-handedly discovered that people like to watch self-important blowhards with problematic hair scream at one another about issues of the day. In doing so, his name became synonymous with, well, self-important blowhard. Long before Donald Trump was running "You're fired" past NBC focus groups, McLaughlin, a former Jesuit priest, Republican Senate candidate, and Nixon speechwriter, was hollering "Wrong!" and wagging that bony finger of his at guests.

McLaughlin was the go-to guy for Hollywood producers looking to inject a sense of verisimilitude into their films—his credits include Dave, Independence Day, Mission: Impossible, and Bulworth.

But like most innovators, McLaughlin eventually found himself eclipsed by his imitators. Aside from a brief spasm of attention a year ago, when sometime Grouper Lawrence O'Donnell asserted on the air, with enough confidence to set press-corps tongues wagging, that Karl Rove would soon be revealed as Matt Cooper's source in the Valerie Plame case, The McLaughlin Group has receded into near obscurity next to the likes of Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Joe Scarborough, et al. Larry King's getting all the film cameos, and it's been over a decade since Saturday Night Live found McLaughlin worthy of parody.

Which is of course why The McLaughlin Group is far and away the best political talk show on television, if not the best show on television. Period. Inattention has been a tonic for the program, which, as the few die-hard fans who tune in each week know, is in the midst of a renaissance. Loosed of any responsibility for ratings—or, for that matter, rational discourse—The McLaughlin Group has slipped the surly bonds of Beltway punditry and ascended into a chaotic, undefinable realm, a weekly gonzo clinic for political junkies. McLaughlin is free to pursue his conspiracy theories and peculiar peccadilloes as his regular panelists—the astonishingly dressed Tony Blankley, Newsweek's shrill and insecure Eleanor Clift, and the chuckling Pat Buchanan—indulge him as if he were the liquored-up patriarch at a loud family dinner. It's a comfort level that can't be manufactured (try as they might on shows like Fox and Friends): this gang of five has been meeting every Sunday morning since the Reagan adminstration. It's the story Network would have told if Howard Beale hadn't lost it all at once, but been allowed to gradually fade, unmolested, into madness.

For instance: "The villain of King Kong is civilized man. His box-office greed ultimately destroys Kong. Beauty kills the beast. What about Freud? Is Freud involved in this, Lawrence? What about the Empire State Building? What does that suggest to you?" The foregoing quote is from what I call McLaughlin's Kong Period, the three consecutive weeks last December when he couldn't stop bringing up the hulking CGI movie monster. Despite his tortured efforts to wrap the movie into some sort of cultural-political critique—a thread Buchanan gamely tried to pick up when he attacked the film for promoting "environmental religion"—I am convinced McLaughlin simply likes to belt out "Kong!" in that stentorian voice of his.

The show is worth watching for those transcendently bizarre moments alone. But at its best, The McLaughlin Group sheds completely the sheen of propriety and artifice that characterizes McLaughlin's cable progeny, leaving the viewer with the genuine impression that these mid- and late-career also-rans gathered around the vintage '80s set are actually saying things they believe to be true. It doesn't matter if no one's watching, right? (After repeated inquiries over the course of a week, McLaughlin Group staffers declined to supply Nielsen ratings data for the show. One staffer claimed the show garners between 2.5 million and 3 million viewers each week, which, if true, would put it neck and neck with ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos, not to mention Smallville.)

I record the Group's 10 a.m. broadcast in New York and watch it later on Sunday, along with the rest of the talk shows, and it is indescribably bracing—after having watched Tim Russert put Ken Mehlman through his questionbot routine—to hear Pat Buchanan declare that Alabamans are the functional political equivalent of ululating Islamic nut jobs. (Clift: "Bin Laden would win an election in Saudi Arabia if it were held today." Buchanan: "And Bush would win in Alabama." Touché!)

When Newsweek reported, and promptly retracted, a claim in May 2005 that Guantanamo guards had been desecrating copies of the Koran, most commentary seized on the media's mendacious role in stoking anti-American sentiment around the globe. McLaughlin was one of the few, if not the only, pundit to note a crucial distinction: "Was [Newsweek reporter Michael] Isikoff's reporting accurate or inaccurate?" he asked Clift. When she replied that Newsweek had recanted, McLaughlin pressed her: "That doesn't mean it's inaccurate."

To which Buchanan added, with his trademark charm, "I don't care whether it's true or false. This report is seditious. Things like this took place in World War I. Eugene Debs went to prison. This undermines the war. I don't care whether it's true."

Both points—1) The fact that a news organization bowed to pressure doesn't change the truth value of its reporting; and 2) News organizations should be prosecuted for sedition irrespective of the truth value of their reporting—are rarely heard in our run-of-the-mill chat-show environments.

But my favorite Buchanan outburst occured during a discussion of various attempts to ban foie gras production—which involves force-feeding ducks with a tube—in the U.S.: "I think this is manifest cruelty to animals, it seems to me. And it is a brutal thing. And I think I would certainly ban that type of thing being done in this country." Who knew?

McLaughlin's trademark mannerisms—the bullying, interrupting, and general harassment that recently led Chris Matthews to call the show "a burlesque on the imperious manner of an absolute autocrat"—seem substantially toned down of late, though it's unclear whether that's due to actual diminished hostility or the fact that bullying, interrupting, and general harassment are no longer remarkable on political talk shows. Still, the vibe is almost relaxed, and his newfound moderation seems to have developed simultaneously with a slide to the political center during the Bush administration. Clift does shriek "Let me finish" at least once a week, but in general McLaughlin runs a jovial ship. He smirks knowingly as Blankley struggles to defend the conservative party line between labored breaths; flirts with British substitute panelist Caroline Daniel; and lets out a guffaw now and again at Buchanan's antics.

But he doesn't brook commonplaces on his air. Matthews & Co. serve as a vast Conventional Wisdom mill. The only purpose any reasonable person would have for tuning in to Hardball, or Hannity & Colmes, or even Washington Week in Review, is to satisfy a curiosity as to What People Are Talking About. And the shows are programmed to do precisely that—endlessly chew over the morning papers and the day's bloggery. Whether he's cognizant of it or not, McLaughlin seems to know that what people aren't talking about is far more interesting, and often far more useful to the political observer. When Mel Gibson's anti-semitic rant and Israel's incursion into Lebanon dominate the headlines, lead with corruption in the Iraqi government; When George Allen is calling people macacas and Don Rumsfeld is calling people Nazi appeasers, lead with a proposal in New Jersey to eliminate religious holidays in public schools. (A proposal, by the way, to which the former Jesuit brother seemed oddly sympathetic.)

Perhaps McLaughlin's most endearing quality is his persistent belief, more pronounced recently, that the political stories he and his panel dissect and analyze so assiduously are merely, quite literally, theater. When Dick Cheney and Vladimir Putin traded barbs last summer in a pair of bellicose speeches, McLaughlin let his naïve panelists parse the implications for a good few minutes before announcing that the whole episode was "wired." He explained, "Now we have the possibility that they both trash each other, then they move toward the center, then they collaborate on a new understanding of the distribution of oil and how oil must not be made a tool of politics. And we look like grand diplomats. What about that? Was it wired?" Wired!



When Hillary Clinton crossed her daughter by publicly attacking the nation's callow youth? Wired. When Fed chairman Ben Bernanke appeared to make a series of rookie gaffes, roiling the markets? Wired. When American forces killed Zarqawi? "The question is, this was wired, was it not? It was wired by Osama. Osama wanted this guy out."


But was Freud involved?

Illustration: © 1998 Al Hirschfeld, courtesy of The McLaughlin Group. Photos, from top: courtesy of The McLaughlin Group; kingkongmovie.com; Linda Spillers/ABC.