My son’s primary care doctor is Chuck Rosenberg’s double. Dr. Liebowitz looks just like the former head of the DEA, who has gone on to become an MSNBC commentator (and host of “The Oath” podcast). But what’s more, he sounds and acts like Rosenberg. His gold tones are usually soothing. I’ll allow, though, my born-to be-guilty self found it daunting when the good doctor suddenly ushered me out of the Consulting Room, drew the curtain and asked my son…what? I didn’t ask after the examination but I assume Dr. Rosenberg—I mean Liebowitz!—wanted to pose a question about my son’s coming of age. Or maybe he was nosing around about our crime family??
As you can tell, Chuck Rosenberg is a pretty heavy presence in my head. Not that that’s his fault. He works hard not to present as the narc he once was. First there’s that voice. And he always tries not to come on from above, though he must be aware he’s sharper than just about any other legal commentator on the tube. Unenthralled by his own expertise, Rosenberg is sort of the anti-Jeffrey Toobin…
I may not want to have a beer—or, more on point, a joint—with Rosenberg, but I attend when he holds forth on MSNBC. I expect crisp analysis from him but last week he gave us all much more when he zeroed in on Mike Pompeo. Rosenberg rarely underscores. (And he never hogs time.) But he took two shots at Pompeo’s cowardice…
Rosenberg came close to directly addressing Pompeo, though he didn’t cross any self-aggrandizing line (“I doubt he’s listening to me.”) His readiness to stick a toe under the third wall—he is on a stage, after all, acting along with other MSNBC regulars—reminded me of the way the late poet Philip Levine would sometimes interrupt poems of working class life to address a genteel reader (“Forget you.”) since Levine knew who was reading him in a venue like the New Yorker. But if that seems a stretch, there’s a referent in a Timesman’s review of Houellebecq’s new novel that’s more obviously apt. (What the hey, provocateur Houellebecq is sort of the anti-Chuck Rosenberg.) That reviewer cited a line by historian and essayist Tony Judt that’s commensurate to Rosenberg’s moment last week. Per Judt: “moral seriousness in public life is like pornography; hard to define but you know it when you see it.”