Leave it to Joe Scarborough to try to paint a happy face on petulant Bibi's reelection in Israel and what it might mean for the future of Palestinian relations.
March 19, 2015

Leave it to Joe Scarborough to try to paint a happy face on petulant Bibi's reelection in Israel, what it might mean for the future of Palestinian relations, and to use it as an opportunity for some hero worship of their patron Saint Ronnie Raygun.

After discussing how the Israelis are going to behave if the Obama administration does manage to strike a deal with Iran on their nuclear program and how terrible it was that President Obama didn't immediately jump and congratulate Benjamin Netanyahu on his victory just after having the Israeli Prime Minister come to the United States and stick his finger in his eye, Scarborough treated the audience to this:

SCARBOROUGH: I will only say this about people saying the two-state solution is dead. Nixon was the only person who could go to China because he had spent thirty years... twenty five years as an anti-Communist, the most strident anti-Communist, he was on the anti-American activities committees in the 1950s. He ran as the coldest of the cold warriors. He opened China.

Ronald Reagan was considered the right wing saber rattling fanatic, anti-Communist fanatic. He just slashed and burned any Republican that would do deals with the Soviet Union, any Republican that would even talk about arms control, any Republican that would even talk about detente. He would call them weak and ineffective and Ronald Reagan from '86 on, spent the last three years working aggressively, striking one deal after another for arms reduction with the Soviet Union.

So I'm not saying that Netanyahu is Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon, but nobody believed at the time that Richard Nixon was Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan was Ronald Reagan. If you had told anybody in 1984 upon his reelection that Ronald Reagan was going to spend his last term striking historic arms deals with the Soviet Union, they would have laughed you out of the hall where he was preaching anti-Communism.

BARNICLE: He had a willing partner though.

SCARBOROUGH: Yeah and the question is are the Palestinians going to be Netanyahu's willing partner? Nobody believed in 1984 that the Soviet Union was going to be a willing partner and then Gorbachev came along. All I'm saying is, things always change in politics and sometimes the very thing that you think is going to block a deal, opens a path to a deal. Netanyahu has been politically afraid. He's shown absolutely no courage over the past several years. Maybe this victory gives him an opening.

Yeah right. If he changes his mind on a two-state solution, it's going to be because he's forced to because President Obama boxes him in with the UN, as John discussed in his post with Netanyahu already flip-flopping later in the day during his interview with Mrs. Greenspan.

And someone please explain to me how the United States and the Soviet Union's relationship during Reagan's time in office in any way, shape or form resembles what's been going on between the Israelis and Palestinians?

Scarborough wrapped things up by repeating the same talking point we heard from Ron Fournier who was on the CNN just after this segment aired on MSNBC, and what a "great opportunity" all of this is for President Obama to "be the bigger man" than Netanyahu, or in other words, let bygones be bygones and forget all about Bibi's treasonous speech and trying to undermine our negotiations with Iran. So nice to see they're all still getting the same bullet points sent to them every morning from the RNC so they can stay on message.

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