Wrapping up a series of reports on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, on Friday’s Today show, dour NBC correspondent Harry Smith used the opportunity to bemoan the lack of progress over the past five decades on liberal agenda items like climate change and economic inequality, among other “problems here at home.”
“Going to the Moon, the Apollo program, would require the resources of the most powerful and technologically advanced nation the world had yet witnessed,” Smith optimistically declared at the beginning of the segment.
However, only moments later, the report took a sharp, dark turn:
And beating the Russians to the Moon was a big darn deal, a battle won in our long cold war. But it did nothing to heal our broken cities, which were bleeding from riots.
And did nothing to stop the U.S. from digging deeper into the trench of despair that was Vietnam. Fifty years later, our mother Earth is burning up from abuse and neglect.
Suddenly he went from the Moon to “the trench of despair” in Vietnam.
Later in the piece, Smith fretted:
“Did we miss something 50 years ago?… maybe space is just easier to conquer than our problems here at home. Poverty, inequality, disease, climate change, we wonder 50 years later what big thing could we, should we accomplish now?”
Co-host Savannah Guthrie gushed over the “perspective” that Smith supposedly brought to the story:
“Well, Harry, you always put it in perspective. It’s easy to romanticize this accomplishment, and why not, it was incredible…But also to look at the work that’s unfinished in this beautiful place.”
Smith noted the cost of the mission to the Moon: “In U.S. Dollars, it was about $25 billion back in the day. In today’s dollars, probably more like a quarter of a trillion.” He then implored: “What could a quarter of a trillion dollars do now?… Where’s our audacity and where’s our sense of common purpose?”
The veteran reporter has a long history of viewing American history with pessimism – at least when Republicans are in the White House.
While reporting for CBS This Morning in 1990, Smith did a series entitled The Record of Who We Are, in which he derided the Reagan era of the 1980s as a “decade of greed,” lamented the U.S. under George H.W. Bush’s leadership as having “a crumbling infrastructure, dirty air, countless homeless people,” and denounced “America’s system of apartheid” when it came to race relations.
For Smith, when the GOP is in power, it’s always midnight in America.
Read transcripts at NewsBusters
the Lying Peacock marks the 50 Aniversary of the Moon Landing by harping on about Global Warming/Climate Change and the Earth Burning Up Just shows why you cant ever trust the M.S. Media at all after all it was The Eagle not the Peacock that Landed
Te TODAY SHOW is not real news its leftists propeganda just like the rest of the M.S. Media the Facts and the Truth is not their cup of Hemlock
The social problems these public lamenters seek to solve are conditions of any society that will always be present, no moatter how affluent or seemingly excessive countries like the US can be. What we hope to do and can succeed in achieving is raising the overall level of everybody, which will mean the rich will get richer and the poor can be less poor, comparatively. If you examine the general conditions in the cities and the agrarian rural circumstances, it is not hard to see that this is already true. Has anybody heard of TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority)? Nearly a century ago, the US was able to bring electrical power to 85 percent of the population across a sweeping region of the Southeast, something many large countries are still trying to achieve. Where it comes to global warming and climate, well, what do I really need to say about that? Actually, nothing at all. It’s a non-issue.