It's been said often and should be repeated as needed: corporations are not people. That's a good thing in the case of NBC, parent company of CNBC, the channel known to millions as the play-by-play commentary on financial markets. But last week, CNBC dared host a debate for the packed field of Republican hopefuls affectionately christened the clown car and were solidly rewarded with howls of faux indignation over the very questions each candidate had agreed to before the spectacle begin.

Today on Sunday talk, NBC had their first, official, real chance to tackle the bullies. They chose instead to join with them.

In a calculated strategy, the king makers and royal hopefuls of the right took the network to task for daring to ask a retired neurosurgeon about his public, massive ethics breach in signing away his professional reputation as spokesman for a disreputable supplement outfit that touts snake-oil concoctions for everything from terminal cancer to Down's Syndrome. They howled with outrage when budget-hawks seeking the highest office in the land were asked how their long discredited, disastrous plans for less regulation and tax-cuts for zillionaires might someday turn out to finally cause less harm than in recent memory or be paid for.

It wasn't enough for moderators to turn the other cheek as one candidate after another delivered a stinging lie on national TV. Just giving the liar in question a chance to trot out the usual smoke and mirrors was considered depriving the "American people a greater understanding of our candidates’ policies and ideas."

That’s the funniest thing I’ll read all day. This notion that the candidates in debate are trying to “give the American people a greater understanding” of their “policies and ideas” is simply laughable. They are, in fact, trying to obscure their ideas and policies with a deluge of well-worn catchphrases and focus group-tested platitudes ... They’re working the refs the way a basketball coach does during a game, hoping that they’ll get more favorable calls later on. Specifically, they’re hoping to get nothing but softball questions in the future debate. And NBC will do it.
Indeed, NBC has already begun doing it. As seen just minutes ago this fine Sunday morning, the reaction on their premier news talk show, Meet the Press with Chuck Todd, was to feature interviews, one with conservative establishment darling Jeb Bush and the other with newly elected speaker of the Republican House Paul Ryan. Both men filled the lion's share of their precious, allotted time saying exactly what you'd expect them to say and what we've all heard many times before.

The Republicans in general, and especially those seeking the 2016 nomination, are stewing in an extremist brew of their own making. One in which their "policy ideas" for lack of a better word tend to fall into two mutually inclusive categories: known to be catastrophic and/or so detached from reality that it's difficult to gauge them outside of fairy-tale fantasy. It's bad enough that ordinary voters have to endure being scolded about deficits by those who helped create the most toxic debt known to mankind, or cannot avoid a trust fund braggart born on third-base bragging incessantly about the triple he hit thanks to his own, superhuman skill.

It's bad enough that apologists for the 21st century's version of the landed gentry are paraded across our screens large and small virtually non-stop, like stylish mannequins mouthing more of the same poison that has us divided so fiercely into vast swaths of struggling middle-class and poor and a tiny handful of extraordinarily wealthy. Now we have to witness NBC groveling, and in the process justifying, the worst kind of public relations extortion by a crew of shameless sociopaths leading a cult every bit as delusional as new age comet-worshippers. Only this one is many times more dangerous to non cult members.

So, it's fortunate for all involved that NBC is not a real boy. Otherwise, they'd be that pitiful, meek, youngster who's reaction to repeated schoolyard violence was to seek favor with the very thugs dealing out bloody bruises to the most vulnerable. Because it didn't have to be this way at all. They could have learned and demonstrated a different, equally human lesson. Where the network took to heart what real people usually learn by age 12: sucking up to bullies never works, it only liberates and encourages more and meaner bullies.