Shermichael Singleton: The Commissioner of Doze

Snore!

There’s a point in the evening when Lawrence O’Donnell invites the usual choir of well-rehearsed voices to sing from the same hymnal—safely, predictably—and I switch the channel. Over to Abby Phillip’s corner I go, half hoping for a sharper edge. On some nights, Anna Navarro tightens the focus with a dash of grit, a bit of Floridian bite, like lime on a rim. But then the camera drifts to the ever-nodding Shermichael Singleton, and you feel the oxygen leave the room.

Singleton—buttoned-up, bone-dry, and running on the fumes of borrowed gravitas. A man with the gait of a political moderate and the heart of a party loyalist, carefully coaching his voice to sound thoughtful while advancing the kind of talking points that once belonged on a napkin in Karl Rove’s pocket. He’s what happens when Ben Carson’s bedside manner meets Newt Gingrich’s basement laboratory.

He doesn’t argue so much as glide—an emcee in the Hall of False Equivalence. His eyes scan the panel like he’s looking for a reasonable soul to agree with him, when what he wants is for no one to notice that he said absolutely nothing at all. Shermichael’s game is to act as a translator in a room where everyone already speaks the language. He tells you water is wet, and the left is angry, and can we all calm down?

Scott Jennings, for all his sins, knows he’s peddling bunk. There’s a glimmer of the huckster in his smirk—a man who survives on sheer audacity. But Singleton? He’s the quiet operator, the smooth jazz version of disinformation, wrapping false balance in a bespoke suit.

And that’s the trick: it’s not that Shermichael Singleton is asleep on air. It’s that he puts you to sleep. He lulls, coasts, cruises through a minefield of moral wreckage as if he’s commentating on the weather. That’s his role—make the outrageous seem procedural. Give Trumpism a sensible haircut.

If there’s a place for this man in modern discourse, I can’t find it. Not on Abby’s panel. Not in the marketplace of ideas. Maybe in a quiet corner of LinkedIn, where old HUD staffers reminisce about missed memos and empty conference calls. Maybe as a guest lecturer on the art of professional neutrality.

But in the here and now? In this anxious, angry, beautiful chaos we call democracy?

Shermichael Singleton is the wrong man with the bad voice at the wrong time.

And Abby, if you’re listening—do the viewers a favour. Retire the Commissioner of Doze.