I Love . . .

Okay, I'll admit it. I 💘 Rachel Maddow. I try to watch TRMS every night on MSNBC. I have come to depend on her for a significant portion of the news that I consume per diem.

It hasn't always been that way, though. 

In fact, when I first caught some glimpses of The Divine Miss M, I had a real aversion to her. I thought that she was mannered. Pompous. Even arrogant. In fact, it got to the point where when her show came on, I immediately flipped to another channel.

Usually to CNN.

But the more I watched CNN, the less I liked the way that they worked. There were some exceptions . . . Ana Cabrera and Chris Cuomo chief amongst them . . . but for the most part I found the CNN anchors to be more interested in promoting themselves and / or each other's new books than in reporting the news. And I thought that they were consistently unfair to their guests. So I watched less and less CNN . . . and more and more MSNBC. And I started to notice that if I gave her the benefit of the doubt, Rachel Maddow was actually not any of the things that I thought that she was. In fact, quite the opposite. She was unabashedly nerdy. She was genuinely funny. She was passionate. But she was fair. And respectful. I started intentionally watching her show.

A couple of days ago just as her show was about to end she was handed a report about the government seeking to open a 4th "tender age" concentration camp for immigrant babies. She started crying and had to hand off to the next anchor. She has since apologized for that, but when she choked up . . . that's when I started to love her.

There are plenty of people who don't give a shit about much of anything these days. 

Rachel Maddow is not one of those people. And I love her. And I will watch her show every night.

Unless there's a guest host. Then it's iffy.

I also love the way that when she hands off to The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, they always talk for a minute or two. Because you can tell that they really care about what they're reporting, and that they respect and love each other.

You come, too.