Other Pundits Were Better? Wrong!
Political commentator John McLaughlin died yesterday, (Tuesday, August, 16) and many current political talk shows owe their popularity to the syndicated host who ran down the weekly issues with a roundtable panel of veteran Washington columnists. The McLaughlin Group ran for 34 years, featuring the host’s rapid questioning of his guests, often cutting them off in mid-sentence, correcting or challenging their positions. SNL’s Dana Carvey began a recurring satire of the show with this segment in 1990 taking the McLaughlin blustering style to its predictable extreme — a machine gun escalation into demanding guests speculate whether there is life on other planets or what number he was thinking of. McLaughlin was a good sport, appearing in the final SNL McLaughlin Group sketch in 1991 as himself. — Eric Gould