In what could be a new record for the Morning Joe crew, Joe Scarborough exploded into an anti-media rant today – a mere six minutes and forty-one seconds into the show. From review of the tape, it is clear that Scarborough had not missed his morning coffee – so that was apparently not the reason for his detonation. What, then, set Scarborough off?
This Scarborough eruption was brought to you by the past (and continuing) failure of the main-stream media to cover President Obama fairly. In Mika Brzezinski’s morning news rundown, there was (what was supposed to be) a short segment on President Obama’s comments yesterday; regarding the latest in a series of auto-maker bailouts:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: How can he say that with a straight face? Seriously. This is one of the things that's troubling about this President is he can say things with a straight face that the media does not call him on.
After arguing the details of the President’s proposal at length (length for a TV show...), Brzezinski provided this gem:
BRZEZINSKI: Okay. I will just finish this off by saying people who had experience drove us into the ground.
Scarborough, who had kept himself generally calm to this point, lost his cool completely.
SCARBOROUGH: No, no, no, no I cannot let, Chris, I can't let Mika get away with repeating the same thing. So you're saying. Just turn off the drum music, everything is killed. News is killed. Just stop it. So Mika, you just repeated the same thing!
After making a particularly entertaining analogy about choosing a lumberjack to perform spinal surgery (see the video above and to the right), Scarborough brought himself back on message:
SCARBOROUGH: The amazing thing is, Mika, if – and this is the failure of the mainstream media.
BRZEZINSKI: What did I say?
SCARBOROUGH: If the mainstream media had covered Barack Obama instead of applauding him during the campaign, you would know off the top of your head that nobody got more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives than Barack Obama. Nobody ran resistance –
BRZEZINSKI: I don't think there's anybody who –
SCARBOROUGH: – for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, more than Barack Obama. There is nothing that Barack Obama did. Nothing while he was in the United States Senate to stop this. Nothing whatsoever. And he's running it all. This is the man who's running our government. Who is – and that's fine. People voted on him to run the government. But did they vote on him to run car companies, to fire CEOs?
BRZEZINSKI: That's where we began this debate.
SCARBOROUGH: And if you say, if you say that people screwed up in the past, so let's just not have anybody with business experience running the biggest corporations in the world, if you say that, why are you allowing a guy that was in bed politically with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac even after they were indicted, making these decisions? Barack Obama was at ground zero of the sub-prime crisis from the day he got in, from the day Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac embraced him. There are going to be bloggers who kill me, oh how can you say that? You know what? Because nobody else is saying this or reporting it and we're supposed to trust him instead of somebody who's actually run a company with more than two people in it?
Scarborough’s incredulity at the lack of media coverage is, to put it lightly, not entirely misplaced. As NewsBusters regularly documents, President Obama is breezing through the media gauntlet like James Bond - irrationally and inconceivably smoothly, and with never so much as a hair out of place.
