MSNBC's Joe Scarborough was a guest on this Tuesday's The Daily Show, and sadly host Jon Stewart allowed Scarborough to peddle his new book, where he pretends he's the new savior of the Republican party with all of the answers for how they're supposed to start winning elections again.
Of course what was lacking was the acknowledgment that the likes of Scarborough and his right-wing extremism during his time in office and as a pundit on television is exactly what was wrong with the party then, and now. It's too bad Stewart or his staff did not read Charlie Pierce's recent article on Scarborough and his book tour. If they had, perhaps he'd have asked Scarborough why anyone should take him seriously now.
Here's Charlie's take down of Scarborough: A Gobshite Special Report: Morning Squint:
Joe Scarborough, the mysteriously well-compensated host of a micro-rated morning talk show asylum for disgraced hacks and television historians, has brought out a new book-like product about which we likely will be hearing far too much on our liberal MSNBC teevee network. Anyway, it seems that Scarborough has taken it upon himself to rescue his beloved Republican party and to return it to the values of Ronald Reagan, who gutted civil rights laws, started his campaign talking about "states rights" not far from the improvised graves of murdered civil-rights workers, made up stories about black bucks buying steaks and welfare queens with their Cadillacs, sold missiles to the people who bankrolled the killing of hundreds of our Marines, and then used the cash to bankroll his own terrorists in this hemisphere. Ah, the good old days. Joe is simply agog at what a monkeyhouse his Republican party has become, and he can't stands no more.
"If the GOP wants to regain its place as the decisive force in national politics, it needs to reengage with its real legacy, which is one of principled conservatism combined with clear-eyed pragmatism. We Republicans have been at our best when we are true to one of the deepest insights of conservatism: that politics, like mankind itself, isn't perfectible in a fallen universe. And if we continue to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, then we will continue to dwindle in influence...Those who would move the party so far right on social issues that their nominated candidates become unelectable are, to borrow an infamous phrase from the Vietnam War, 'destroying the village to save it.'"
[...] Let us look at this remarkable transformation through the microcosmic device of a single political career. Let us look at it through the clear-eyed and pragmatic career of one Joe Scarborough.
Joe comes from Pensacola -- Town Motto: It Takes the Entire State of Kansas to Kill as Many Doctors as We Do -- and made his bones in the radical anti-choice movement. In 1993, a man named Michael Griffin did the Lord's work by murdering Dr. David Gunn because Gunn helped women exercise constitutional rights of which Griffin, the nut, disapproved. Having killed a man in cold blood, Griffin needed a lawyer. So who stepped up in defense of Griffin's Sixth Amendment right to counsel?
Why none other than Joe Scarborough who also, as Wayne Barrett wrote in a lengthy take down in 2008, collected over 15 G'=s from the National Right To Life Committee. [...]
Then, as we moved through the Bush years, the Republicans moved "so far right on social issues" that they involved themselves, on the state and national level, in an intensely personal decision being made by the family of a woman named Terri Schiavo. They meddled in this situation and ginned up a mob to the point where Michael Schiavo, the woman's husband, had a bounty on his head. They meddled in this situation and ginned up a mob to the point where an elementary school down the block from the hospice where Ms. Schiavo was being treated got a bomb threat and had to be closed for two weeks. They meddled in this situation and ginned up a mob to the point where federal judges had around-the-clock protection from federal marshals. They meddled in this situation and ginned up a mob to the point where elderly volunteers got called "Nazis" when they sought to come to the hospice and work. They meddled in this situation and ginned up a mob to the point where the directors of the hospice drove home from work by a different route every night. They meddled in this situation and ginned up a mob because they didn't give a fk about Terri Schiavo, or her family, or about the people in that hospice whose lives they endangered. All they cared about was what they perceived to be the political advantage in this case -- about which they were wrong, and people kept telling them they were wrong, and polls kept telling them they were wrong. Joe Scarborough didn't give a fk about Terri Schiavo, or her family, or the people in that hospice whose lives he was helping endanger because Joe Scarborough had a career in television to kick-start and a brand to build. [...]
The meddling of which Joe Scarborough was a conspicuous part -- Sean Hannity will do time in a hotter part of hell for his performance in this sad episode, but that's for another day. -- endangered the lives of people doing god's own work in an already impossible situation. It was morally indefensible and, more to the point, given what he's arguing these days in his new book-like product, it was politically idiotic. (The Schiavo pageant was central to the thrashing the Republicans got in the 2006 midterms and instrumental in the elevation of Nancy Pelosi to the Speakership.) The country stated quite clearly through the 1998 midterms that it didn't want the president impeached over blowjobs. Joe Scarborough helped the House impeach the president over blowjobs. The country stated quite clearly, over and over again, that it wanted the government to butt out of the Terri Schiavo case. Joe Scarborough continued to jump in the middle of a family tragedy with both feet. And now he has the solid-gold gall to tell, say, Ted Cruz that extremism is damaging the Republican party?
The only problem Joe Scarborough has with modern day Republicanism is that it has started to lose elections. If the meddling in the Schiavo case had worked out the way conservatives like Joe Scarborough thought that it would -- and now he has the solid-gold gall to criticize the Romney people for being unrealistic? -- we wouldn't be hearing fk-all from Joe Scarborough about the problem the party has with "far-right positions" on social issues and about the dangers of incivility in our politics. This is Machiavelli for morons, and, quite simply, there is no bigger phony on the political stage right now than Joe Scarborough, who is attempting to teach table manners to the monster he helped create.
Amen to that and why he's allowed on any network to peddle his garbage and revisionist history is just beyond me.
