Applying the Gipper's timeless rule, Morning Joe was losing today.
Except for a few minutes of gloating over the Celtics NBA championship, the remainder of the first half-hour was devoted to trying to explain away recent videos suggesting a dazed and confused Biden.
Mika Brzezinski was particularly distraught, quoting a Democrat strategist: "As one Democratic strategist puts it, quote, 'The lie sprinting the 100-meter dash and the fact check is taking a stroll on the beach.'".She lamented that the people voting "for democracy" (Biden) are "never gonna have a chance against lies, disinformation, and crazy insults."
Joe Scarborough tried to console her, saying Dems will just have to "work harder" to get that supposed truth out. "If you look at Donald Trump's track record and Donald Trump's Republican party over the last seven years, they're 0-7."
It was telling that the only video shown was the one from the G7 summit, where Biden doddered away from the rest of the group. Yes, he was greeting landing paratroopers, but Biden was the only one who wandered off, unaware that there was a group photo shoot underway, and having to be led back by the Italian prime minister. And whatever Biden's intentions, his halting gait and lost aura were unmistakeable.
Morning Joe didn't dare display the video of Biden having to be led off the stage by Barack Obama at a recent Los Angeles fundraiser.
Karine Jean-Pierre's laughable explanation was that Obama and Biden are "like family" and Barack was just putting his arm around his old buddy Biden. Riight. Such close friends that Obama tried to discourage Biden from running in 2016 and 2020. And then there was the famous episode in which, Obama, suffering as Biden droned endlessly on during a confirmation hearing, passed an aide a "Shoot. Me. Now" note.
Scarborough also contradicted himself in glaring fashion. After spending the segment kvetching about conservatives supposedly misrepresenting the videos, Scarborough claimed that in doing so, "they're only helping Joe Biden" by lowering expectations. If so, surely the astute political mind that is Scarborough would simply keep his trap shut, and let those right-wingers continue to aid Biden's cause!
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
6/18/23
6:01 am EDTMIKA BRZEZINSKI: The White House is slamming cheapfake videos spread by right-wing media which are edited to make President Biden look confused. We'll go through the fight against clips with no context, and some edited and misleading.
. . .
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You know, the age issue for both of these candidates, that's a real issue.
MIKA: Yeah.
SCARBOROUGH: So talk about the issue. You want to talk about it? I think everybody thinks both of these candidates are older than they're comfortable with, both of them.
That said, make those issues, don't make up others.
MIKA: Well, and also, I think when those on the right try to make it look like Biden is out of his mind, or the Wall Street Journal does a front-page piece saying Biden is completely slipping, and they don't notice at the very same time that they're covering Biden in this way that is misleading, Donald Trump is onstage talking about sharks and batteries, and really looks like he's slipping.
. . .
JONATHAN LEMIRE: The New York Post, let's just take that as an example. They knew better. It had been hour -- it had been a full day earlier in the aftermath of that moment in Normandy. It was completely debunked. There's videos from other angles, not just put out by the Biden campaign, but put out by independent observers, saying, no, no, President Biden was not meandering off. He was going to salute to one of the other parachutists and the prime minister signaled him. He came back to take that photograph
For hours, that was a done story. And the New York Post put it on thefront page anyway the following morning and tried to turn it into something it was not.
. . .
SCARBOROUGH: Jonathan, Jonathan's right. You have to start asking are these coming on high? When you have the same news organization doing what Jonathan just said, deliberately lying about a shot, cropping it in the way they know they're lying to the readers.
Right? And that comes about a week after the Wall Street Journal story that they know is misleading. No reasonable person could not know it's misleading. And again, why we bring this up. We bring it up just to say this is, we've now expanded far out from just deepfakes on Twitter/X, other social media, TikTok, to now deepfakes, or cheapfakes even, in the New York Post and other publications.
. . .
SCARBOROUGH: They lie about their lies, which, of course, you would expect liars to lie about their lies.
MIAK: We are talking about Trump's --
SCARBOROUGH: They're lying about their cheapfake. By the way, I just, I got to say this one more time. They're only helping Joe Biden, they're only lowering expectations. They do it before every State of the Union address, and then afterwards, they're so freaked out that Biden did well, they say he must have been on cocaine.
. . .
MIKA: The Washington Post has reported about how these cheapfakes were used to attack Biden during his recent trip to Normandy. And we showed you last week the Trump campaign sharing a clip which appeared to show President Biden at the G7 summit wandering off from other world leaders before the Italian prime minister comes over to alert him of a group photo.
But when you see the video from a different angle, you see the whole story. After a skydiver landed in front of the president and other leaders, President Biden turns to his left where there are troops. The president appears to say something to them, and gives them the thumb's up before he is tapped on the arm by the Italian prime minister.
As these cheapfakes continue to circulate, there is growing concern that attempts to fact check them may not be able to keep up. As one Democratic strategist puts it, quote, "The lie sprinting the 100-meter dash and the fact check is taking a stroll on the beach."
So, it's never going to catch up, and it's never going to have the same reach. And this is the problem. And this is why the debate, everything about this campaign will make somebody who is in support of democracy, and perhaps would even choose Joe Biden over Donald Trump just in support of democracy, never gonna have a chance against lies, disinformation, and crazy insults.
SCARBOROUGH: Never going to have a chance. Michael Steele, I disagree. They will have a chance. In fact, if you look at Donald Trump's track record and Donald Trump's Republican party over the last seven years, they're 0-7.
So, yeah, maybe the Biden team's going to have to work harder. Maybe Democrats are going to have to work harder. Maybe people who actually like American democracy are going to work harder. But they just have to work harder, and get the word out that these people are lying. Not only is the RNC lying, but also mainstream media outlets are now all in on the lies.
