Rachel Maddow Nears Sainthood

How can you not be deeply in love with Rachel Maddow? I mean, the whole world is! She's everywhere, and she deserves to be. From her interview in the new issue of The Advocate:

Rachel Maddow’s not only bringing thinking back to TV news, she’s assuring herself a spot on the Mount Rushmore of broadcasting, right next to Murrow, Cronkite, and Brokaw.

. . . Maddow clearly knows what she’s talking about, but she speaks plainly, with the familiar pop-culture dialect used in real-people discussions at the bar; she described the presidential debates as “non sequitur-y” and used the jack-o’-lantern to illustrate the economy’s collapse by comparing Lehman Bros. bigwigs to kids who gorge themselves sick on Halloween candy. When exposing the rhetoric and outright lies of politicians, she ditches courtroom-style accusations for barely contained mirth. She’s sarcastic, but not bitingly so, and everyone is in on the joke—even those from whom she’s gleefully demanding honesty. Whether by nature or keen observation, she’s broken from both the holier-than-thou and gloom-and-doom approaches to punditry and offers something different: truth, with a twist. She’s now the go-to gal for people too embarrassed to admit they were getting much of their news from Jon Stewart.

More after the jump.

Even more exciting than having achieved this level of success as an out lesbian is the fact that her intelligence, wit, and fresh take on politics have overshadowed the fact that she’s an out lesbian.

. . . There, over a perfectly made old-fashioned, Maddow -- out, proud, and unafraid to go head-to-talking-head with far-right Republican Pat Buchanan -- shows the first sign of not being completely at home in the spotlight. “I feel lucky to have all this attention and all of these people wanting to talk to me about what I’m doing,” she says. “The only hesitation I have is that I’m not interested in media about media. I feel like I sometimes struggle to be interesting in talking about how I got here.”

. . . That’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. Not only is Maddow in demand for being a sign of positive change, but she’s dedicated to being an agitator for truth. “I’m trying to make an uproar,” she says. “I’m at least trying to make jokes. If you talk about something in a funny way, people think about it.

Read the full Advocate interview here. I swear, I am moments away from converting to lesbianism. Moments. (And I gotta say that I called her success explosion weeks and weeks ago!)