I have no idea what MSNBC was thinking when they hired Joe Scarborough to host the morning news and vaguely entertainment program that they absurdly call “Morning Joe.”
First of all, Joe Scarborough can’t command enough attention to have a “show” named after him. He is far less astute than, say, Pat Buchanan and less abrasive than Rush Limbaugh and barely more knowledgeable than Sarah Palin. He spends his entire time trying to insinuate Republican talking points into dialogue. Of course, Mika Brzezinski is hardly there. One can imagine her simply fading away like the Canterbury Ghost right in the middle of a conversation. And Mike Barnicle? He should appear briefly on St. Patrick’s Day and go away until Thanksgiving. Occasionally Chuck Todd, obviously hired by NBC to bring some rationality to on-air proceedings, has facts or figures or insights borne of good interview techniques that make sense.
We have enough people on television telling the American people what they think. For some reason, the American people didn’ t get the message that Joe Scarborough wanted them to get and they elected Barack Obama, plus 58 Democratic Senators and a huge majority of House members.
Then came the Republican-engineered economic crash. The country almost went down the drain. It is bad now but it could have been a disaster, because of lax supervision of financial markets, “good old boy” trading in the millions and billions of dollars and a President and Vice President absorbed by petty greed, intolerance and political ambition. There can be no doubt now. The Bush Administration exhibited reckless–to my mind literally criminal–behavior.
So what does MSNBC do? They try to stimulate open discussion. They do that how? By telling progressive co-anchor Brzezinski to keep her mouth shut. By hiring empty suit Kernan as another live body. By bringing in a benign but irrelevant Irish-columnist. By adding another former Nixon-Reagan partisan, Pat Buchanan. And by letting the Neoconservative Republican partisan, Joe Scarborough, a mental midget running two ticks ahead of Sarah Palin on the English language confuse-o-meter, spit out Right Wing talking points to keep the People as far as possible from what they voted for.
If Scarborough doesn’t like what the President is doing, he should run for President. But to exaggerate or downright misstate what the President is doing is disingenuous at least and is borderline treasonous in a country fighting an economic war to survive.
The Republican Party has decided..to hell with the people and their welfare. Our welfare, the success of the Right Wing of the Republican Party, is more important. So they have made the conscious decision to try to shoot down any important legislation that will bring the economy back. Boehner has said it. Limbaugh has said it. McConnell has supported it. They will do everything that they can to see that this President fails.
Joe Scarborough is on their side. And every morning he pushes their agenda. Someone needs to push Joe Scarborough out of the studio and lock the door.