November 29, 2017

Hey Morning Joe, it's time to suck up to Peggy Noonan!

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Who loves Peggy Noonan?
[Off Camera]: Unanimous.
SCARBOROUGH: Everybody is raising their hand out there.

And now let's blame both sides for Trump's fail on tax and debt negotiation, and all of political history since the '90's!

SCARBOROUGH: ...So Donald Trump is supposed to be the deal maker. "Elect me; I'll make the deal." And yet yesterday in a situation where he needs Democrats to raise the debt ceiling, because as I've said before, yahoos like me always vote against raising the debt ceiling. There's 20 or 30 in the Republican party that won't. He insults the leaders -- taunts them at a key moment.

PEGGY NOONAN: Taunts them at a key moment.

SCARBOROUGH: And anybody who asks me about Washington. What do you need to know about Washington to succeed there? Know that it is not what it seems and that the minority leader in the Senate is usually the most powerful person in Washington. He taunts Chuck Schumer, he taunts Nancy Pelosi, and now he's put in a position where he may have a government shutdown with Republicans owning all of Washington. All the real estate. What are we to make of this leader at this time?

NOONAN: Well, it struck me yesterday as I watched the extraordinary White House meeting with the two empty chairs representing the Democrats who didn't come to the meeting, I just thought, "Obamacare was not successful."

OH, PEGGY.

Yes, she's talking about Trumpcare. But hold up. She continues, and equates the "pushing through of Obamacare" to Republicans on the tax bill...and the Iraq War? And no one on the set of Morning Joe immediately escorted her from the set for a little detox, because she's sitting there and being paid to do exactly what she's doing--both-sidering Donald Effing Trump.

NOONAN: The Obamacare reform, the tax thing not -- or the tax thing a struggle and we'll see how it goes. President Trump is not good at the art of the political deal. He apparently was good at business deals. He has won an election race, but he's not good at making the deals you've got to make to get big legislation through. It seemed to me from day one with President Trump the obvious play was for the Democrats. Trump himself had a base, but they were ideologically mixed.

SCARBOROUGH: They would follow him wherever he went.

NOONAN: Originally they were afraid of him. They didn't know his power, they were shocked by his victory. There could have been a real coming together moment there. I think the moment was wasted. I don't think the president understood what the play was. I think he was fooled, frankly, by Republicans in the House and Senate into thinking they were the play, they were the people who together they could do everything. But I don't think among many thoughts, I suppose on this, I don't think we are living in the age where any major piece of legislation will be respected and accepted by the American people unless two parties back it, end of story, and he's not there.

SCARBOROUGH: So let's look back over the past 30 years and look what presidents got right and what presidents got wrong. H.W. Bush. The first Gulf War. He threw his arms around Democrats and Republicans. He threw his arms around -- the whole world.

NOONAN: The whole world. He had Syria -- how many allies did we have in Desert Storm?

SCARBOROUGH: And he understood, he understood that he was open for business. The business of making friends. You can look at Bill Clinton, a guy that drove me crazy at times, but by the end we -- you know, I always joked, people would say what was Bill Clinton like? I said you could impeach him on a Thursday and on Friday he'd ask you to go out golfing and never talk about it. Of course never invite me out golfing but we joked about it on the Hill. For Bill Clinton it was never about what was in his rear-view mirror, it was what vote do I need to win tomorrow. But you look at George W. Bush and Karl Rove.

NOONAN: And he did welfare reform so brilliantly. He allowed the Republicans to drag him kicking and screaming to that bill. He tormented them, getting everything he thought he could get to make it better for his base and together they signed it and laughed and went on. That's how you do it. It's not good that we don't do it that way anymore. I think Mr. Obama gets some responsibility here for how he bullied through Obamacare in the same way.

SCARBOROUGH: [quickly changing the subject?] Again, as we move forward, I wanted to talk about George W. Bush and Iraq. Yes, he had Democratic votes, but it was his way or the highway, and Democrats learned that pretty quickly. So the Iraq War when it went badly was owned by George W. Bush. Barack Obama passed Obamacare, everything, and, yes, you can blame the Republicans just like Donald Trump can blame the Democrats. But anybody that knows Washington knows there's always a deal to be made. I don't care who it is. There's always a Democrat you can pick off, there's always a Republican you can pick off. But here we have the third presidency where sort of the balkanization of American politics. And I think you're right, aren't the American people at a point where they're like 'I want to see both sides together. I want a bipartisan bill.'

NOONAN: They don't respect a big bill unless both sides have a piece of it.

MIKE BARNICLE: This is uniquely different, though, this presidency. I mean this is -- you can say all you want about George W. Bush and Iraq or Barack Obama and Obamacare. This is uniquely different. This is an independent contributor, a solo act. He's always been a solo act. He has no sense of what it is like to be on a team, no sense at all. And it's -- this is frightening. We are at a frightening point in our democracy.

Build that lifeboat, Mike Barnicle! Trump is only still sitting in that White House with the protection of the Republican Congress in order to sign the terrible tax cut for billionaires. THEIR BILL. That will destroy the economy, decimiate Medicare, hurt the poor, and explode the deficit. It's a Republican bill and has been on the Republican wish list for at least two decades.

And Peggy can re-write history on Obamacare passage but we. see. her.

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