Greta Van Susteren goes Off the Record.

My close proximity to many of the newsmakers can give me a different perspective about people in politics and what they might say than others who don't know them.

Vanity Fair breaks the news:

“Remember me?” Greta Van Susteren crooned to the camera as she raised the curtain on her new MSNBC show on January 9. “I’m baaack.”

And today, after less than six months:

I am out at MSNBC -

— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) June 29, 2017

The former Fox News babe, famous for not being sexually harassed by Roger Ailes, was a network fixture from 2002 to 2016, used her penalty box time for quitting CNN for a famously irrelevant start for a right-wing talk show:




Stuck at 6 pm, between MSNBC's afternoon time-filling dullards and the high-octane evening lineup of Christ Matthews, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell, Van Susteren never fit in with even the network's rightward tilt (they also recently signed right-wing space alien Hugh Hewitt and the superannuated George Will for slots in the weekend dungeon where resides Al Sharpton and hours of prison documentaries).

Her face an immovable mask that always seemed to have had the late actor Kevin McCarthy's mouth transplanted to it, Van Susteren was, simply, dull. She has never been particularly ideological- she got into TV as a famously unkempt DC litigator plucked up to do celebrity trial commentary for CNN, jumped to Fox out of pique and for a million dollar salary, and left in much the same manner, complaining in social media, during her four-month hiatus, that the network hadn't returned her desk tchotchkes to her.

One Daily Beast reviewer suggested her MSNBC show might best be retitled Softball.

Her last days featured a tedious ad showing her in a Martin's Tavern, a DC-area bar every president from Harry Truman to Bush 2 frequented. She made them all out for barflies, hanging in the joint for one-on-one conversations in "an atmosphere of mutual respect" before promising similarly soporific fare, "no reservations needed."

As with her Fox departure, there's no farewell show tonight. I tried to see her 100-day celebration show, from April 18, on MSNBC's site just now.

It's a black screen. 

What's next for her? Who knows- Washington Journal on C-SPAN?