When you’ve lost Bill Maher, you’ve lost smug-middle-aged-liberal-TV-host America.

How long before Bob Costas turns on them too?

Whatever we had is not working any more. You’re obviously interested in another man: Chris Christie. You’re obsessed with him. So I wanted you to hear it from me first. I’m going to start seeing other news organizations. I’ll miss what we had. It was a rocket ship ride. We were both passionate flaming liberals and we didn’t care what the world thought of us. It was a glorious time. We finished each other’s Sarah Palin jokes. But now we never talk about any of the things we used to talk about: global warming, gun control, poverty… All because Chris Christie came along and put you under his spell.

Look at yourself. You’re turning into Fox News. Bridgegate has become your Benghazi, and this isn’t easy to say, but you and I are no longer on the same news cycle. Sure, you read me the results of a recent Gallup poll, but you never really ask me how I’m feeling. It’s not you, it’s… Chris Christie.

You’ve stopped leaning forward.

Oh, come on. MSNBC’s still ladling out plenty of slop for its longtime fans. Just a few hours before Maher penned his break-up note, Chris Matthews was babbling about the GOP becoming Jefferson Davis’s party. And sometimes the heavy Bridgegate coverage is strategic, to the exclusion of less palatable topics. Remember when Obama delayed the employer mandate again last week? You don’t if you’re an MSNBC viewer.

It’s easy to mock them for Bridgegate fee-vah, partly because of the ridiculous breathlessness of it and partly because their motives in wanting to take him down before 2016 are so transparent. Two points in their defense, though. One: They’re giving the (liberal) people what they want. On Monday, February 3rd, the night that O’Reilly aired part two of his Super Bowl interview with Obama, MSNBC nonetheless beat three out of four Fox News shows in primetime in the 25-54 demo by focusing on Christie. (O’Reilly’s show was the sole winner on Fox.) Liberals have been playing defense for Obama for a long, long time. Must feel good to them to be able to punch a big name on the other side in the face for awhile. Two: Bridgegate is a rare case where the network actually broke some news. Their own CEO has warned reporters in the past that they’re … not really in the news business anymore. They’re in the progressive slop business — until recently, when Christie handed them this. Turns out viewers like tuning in not knowing if maybe there’ll be new dirt dished on Christie rather than just another hour of Chris Hayes finger-wagging about income inequality or whatever. Who knew?

Does anyone on our side care about this anymore, incidentally? Christie fans don’t, I think, because they concluded weeks ago that there’s no there there. No one has the goods on Christie himself. Christie haters don’t care care because they’ve also reached a conclusion, namely that he’s too badly damaged at this point to be a serious threat for the nomination. They’re happy to have lefty media continue to take a wrecking ball to him but there’s no need. They think he’s sunk.