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Joe Scarborough Tag

On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough  said that President Trump "revealed himself as the jackass that leaked top secret Israeli intel,"  adding that the intel that President Trump allegedly leaked was "about somebody on the inside of a terror organization that killed 20 little girls and their mothers last night." Scarborough first observed that in denying that he had mentioned Israel in his meeting with the Russians, Trump was denying something of which he had not been accused. Scarborough said that was like a man who runs into a police station saying "my wife's missing and it's not my gun that's at the bottom of the pond in the back of our house by her body."

Joe Scarborough has painted a no-win portrait of VP Pence. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough said that Vice-President Pence "is either a sucker and a dupe for Donald Trump . . . or he's a liar. There is no middle ground." Giving Pence the dubious benefit of the doubt, Scarborough advised, "if it is the first, I think it's about time for Mike Pence to go to Donald Trump and say, as I think most of us would, if you set me up to be your liar again, I'm walking."

Earlier this month, Joe Scarborough compared President Trump to his own mother, "who has had dementia for ten years." Joe was back on his Trump-is-crazy beat on today's Morning Joe. After Mika cited a Washington Post article quoting an anonymous source who wondered whether President Trump "is in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion," Joe weighed in, saying he's heard reports all weekend that "the president is running around, screaming at television sets. He's increasingly isolated." Joe then upped the ante, adding that there are "reports at his club that he's going off, detached. Almost detached from reality."

On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said he didn't want to bring religion into the health care debate. But he then proceeded to do just that. He said that he's not judging anybody, but then said that the Republican health care bill can't be defended "morally." Scarborough:
"I'm sorry, don't want to bring religion into this, but if you are a Matthew 25 Christian and you believe what Jesus says, that we will be judged on how we treat the poorest among us, then there is no legislative justification for cutting $650 billion in health benefits. And then turning around in the same bill and benefiting the richest among us $800, $850 billion.

This isn't the first time that Mika Brzezinski has said something critical about Clinton world. So maybe it was just a coincidence that on the day it became public that she and Joe Scarborough have become engaged, Mika took a real shot at the decision not to go after Huma Abedin for forwarding classified emails to her husband Anthony Weiner, ostensibly for the purpose of having him print them off. Said Mika, "I don't understand how Hillary Clinton's e-mails are forwarded to Huma Abedin's husband so he can print them out. What? What? I don't know. Maybe there's no law against it. Seriously, maybe there's no law against it . . . It's incredible. It's everything that was wrong with the campaign." When Joe said that in fact there was a law against it, and suggested the Clinton campaign thought it was playing by different rules, Mika concurred: "totally different rules."

"Pathetic." "Arrogance." Those were the key words that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski used on today's Morning Joe, respectively, to describe Hillary Clinton's excuse-making for her loss. As our Mike LaChance—the artist formerly known as Aleister—has noted, Hillary was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour yesterday. Clinton paid lip service to her own mistakes, but ultimately concluded that "the reason I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last 10 days," citing the Comey letter and Wikileaks. Scarborough: "So who's going to say it on the set? Who's going to say it? Anybody going to say it? That was pathetic. I'll say it. Let me go out, I'll get killed." Mika went on to repeatedly speak of the "arrogance" of Hillary and the Clinton campaign. Sample: Hillary's comments show "this arrogance, and this sense that this was a coronation was so engrained in her."

The entire opening segment of today's Morning Joe was devoted to Joe and Mika's suggestion that President Trump is, literally, demented. The show repeatedly cited Douglas Brinkley's claim that in his recent interviews, Trump showed himself to be in a "confused mental state." Joe made his view very explicit. Focusing on a statement Trump made about the Civil War, Scarborough said: "my mother has had dementia for ten years. That sounds like the sort of thing my mother would say today." Scarborough went on to twice suggest that the president can't remember what he said five minutes ago. Mika portentously declared that "we're going to say—maybe no one—I'm not sure he's okay. I'm not sure he's okay. You have that feeling with people who are not okay, where it starts to dawn on you that they are not okay."

Surprising consensus on today's Morning Joe that Barack Obama blew it bigly in Syria by punting on his redline. Even Obama fan Mike Barnicle admitted, "Syria was a serious mistake that the Obama administration made." Foreign policy honcho Richard Haass said "history's going to be rough on this. This is going to be the defining moment for the Obama presidency." It wasn't just the panel that trashed Obama's mishandling of Syria. Joe Scarborough noted that not only did leading Dems like John Kerry and Hillary quickly come out in support of Trump's strikes, but that Dems were saying things that were "almost disloyal to Barack Obama, saying we could have never moved this quickly."

Kibitzing about Donald Trump's mental health is a favorite MSM parlor game. But Morning Joe took it to a new level today, devoting its long, opening segment to the matter. Donny Deutsch and Joe Scarborough were the ringleaders, playing Drs. Freud and Jung, respectively. Excerpts:

On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough argued that the MSM is failing to cover the story of the Obama admin "unmasking"and leaking the names of Trump campaign people caught up in the intercepts of Russians. According to Scarborough, 95% of the story is the attempt by the Russians to influence the election. But that still leaves the 5% that the MSM is ignoring because the people unmasked were disliked, and in the case of Michael Flynn, "loathed" by the media. In contrast, said Scarborough, the improper activity was "by people who, let's face it, most of the people in the media like and admire."

Joe Scarborough spent the first half-hour of today's Morning Joe blasting White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon for the failure of the health care bill. Excerpts:
  • "I will call Steve Bannon a hack. When you go in and threaten members, you're not only a hack, you're stupid at your game . . . Bannon failed miserably. He is the biggest loser."
  • "The stupidity of Steve Bannon knows no ends."
  • "He's an idiot when it comes to how Washington works."
  • "He blew this."

Should conservatives be rooting for the health care bill to pass the House today, or be defeated or withdrawn? Joe Scarborough made an interesting observation today, quoting the late Senator Paul Simon at the end of his career on the biggest lesson he had learned: "sometimes when you win, you lose. And sometimes when you lose, you win." Scarborough pointed to the way Democrats whooped it up when they "won" on Obamacare in 2010 . . . and proceeded to experience six years of political "hell," losing 1,000 seats across the country. Opined Scarborough, "I think the best thing that could happen is this bill goes down today. Actually, that they pull it. Let them start renegotiating from the very beginning, do it the right way and move on to tax reform, something that will unite all conservatives.

Did the Trump White House use the House intel committee chairman to divert attention from the committee's investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians? That's what Joe Scarborough suggested on today's Morning Joe.  Scarborough said that his reporting suggests that the White House "shoved" committee chairman Devin Nunes in front of the cameras to reveal that communications of President Trump and associates may have been intercepted after the election by intelligence agencies conducting surveillance of foreign targets. Scarborough: "it just looked like, and sounded like from some reporting I did yesterday, that you had the White House desperate to do anything to change headlines this morning, because, again, from the reporting I did yesterday, talking to people in the White House, they were so desperate to change the narrative that it looks like they shoved him out with this information—just any information, anything—to change the headlines. And to blow up the investigation in the House. And it looks like that's exactly what they did."

Joe Scarborough went on an epic rant this morning against liberal academia and the way it shuts down and ultimately radicalizes conservative students who grow frustrated with being stifled in the classroom. The segment began as an effort to explain Stephen Miller's personality, as Morning Joe cited a column by Andrew Sullivan in which he speaks of conservative students who are often "mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus" and often react by adopting "brattish and obnoxious positions just to tick off their SJW peers and teachers."

An extraordinary first half-hour of Morning Joe today. The thesis was that President Trump had gotten off on a seriously bad foot by failing to look back at history in his inauguration speech, sending a first and ungracious tweet about the Women's Marches, sending Sean Spicer out to berate the press over crowd-size reporting, and above all for a self-referential, boastful, angry speech, referencing crowd size, given while standing in front of the wall of fallen heroes at the CIA. And the message, delivered repeatedly and in the starkest terms, by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, was that those aides who abetted President Trump, who counseled him to adopt a combative tone, should be fired and leave immediately. View the video to see the myriad ways in which Joe and Mika pummeled the presidential aides who did not advise President Trump to moderate his remarks.

Is the party—the Republican party, that is—over? That's what Joe Scarborough is predicting. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough surmised that "Donald Trump, by the end, will blow apart the Republican party" and that people are "going to look at George W. Bush as the last Republican president." Scarborough depicted Trump as "in a sense, the first independent president." Joe also suggested that Bernie Sanders might have the same party-demolishing impact on the Democrats.

Cory Booker's shameless gambit of launching his presidential bid by attacking Jeff Sessions has really gotten under this Insurrectionist's skin. From my Quick Hit of this morning: "I reckon he earned the scorn of many of his fellow Dems for his transparent ploy." And so it was gratifying to get confirmation this morning from Joe Scarborough, who on Morning Joe said this of Booker's stunt: "obviously calculated . . . in a way that would have the other senators, especially Democratic senators, wanting to drag him away . . .  a lot of senators irked, especially on the Democratic side. They thought he was launching his bid for the 2020 campaign."