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Morning Joe Tag

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on January 05, 2017 25 Comments
As soon as Yahoo's Bianna Golodryga said she didn't want to "turn political," you knew that was precisely what she was about to do. But when Golodryga proceeded to criticize the Texas open-carry law this morning, you might be surprised that it was Meredith Vieira who—excuse the expression—shot her down. Vieira was a guest on Morning Joe to discuss a documentary, for which she served as executive producer, about the University of Texas Tower shootings in 1966, in which Charles Whitman shot 49 people, killing 16. The gun-control shoe was bound to drop, and after her "not to turn political," Golodryga launched into a criticism of the new Texas open-carry law, fretting that it could prevent UT from attracting "students and the top talent in teaching for fear of this law." Retorted Vieira: "It's interesting. On that day, the students were allowed to carry on campus and the police relied on them. One of the police -- they didn't have SWAT teams back then and they didn't have the equipment either to get to somebody who was up in the tower. So they were asking students: does anybody have a shotgun? The police themselves didn't have shotguns. And the students helped them."

Posted by Mary Chastain on January 04, 2017 17 Comments
Sen. Joe Manchin (W-VA) told Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe that he will not attend a meeting with President Barack Obama to discuss how to save Obamacare:
“No, I’m not. I just can’t, in good conscience, I can’t do it,” he said. “If anyone listened and paid attention to what the American people said when they voted, they want this place to work.”

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on January 02, 2017 24 Comments
Whatever happened to those 'Question Authority' and 'Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism' bumper stickers that flourished on liberals' cars during the dark days of George W.'s administration? Now, in the waning days of a Dem presidency, a touching trust in the judgment of the president is in evidence on the left. On today's Morning Joe, Prof. Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of Princeton's African-American studies department, said he is "struck" that anyone would question President Obama's judgment that sanctions against Russia are warranted. After all, argued Glaude, the president "has sworn to protect this country."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 28, 2016 30 Comments
Then why did Barack Obama get so many things so wrong? That's the question that inescapably arises in response to the claim by NBC correspondent Chris Jansing on today's Morning Joe that Obama's decision-making style is "very professorial, thoughtful, in-depth." Jansing said that Obama and Trump "could not be more different in the way they approach problem solving," describing Obama admin concerns about Trump's supposed "shoot-from-the-hip" style. Mike Barnicle weighed in to wonder whether Trump would be up to the task of comforting the nation after tragedies such as the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 27, 2016 23 Comments
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is no conservative, and certainly no fan of Donald Trump. The headline of a column he wrote during the campaign, after all, was "Trump’s Hitlerian disregard for the truth." Which makes his column of today, "Thanks to no-drama Obama, American leadership is gone," which absolutely rips the bark off Barack Obama, all the more remarkable. Observing that Obama "has been all too happy to preside over the loss of American influence," he describes the current president as having "waved a droopy flag. He did not want to make America great again. It was great enough for him already." On Syria, Obama "threw in the towel. The banner he flew was one of American diminishment."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 23, 2016 10 Comments
It was the strangest of settings for some very serious breaking news. There was Mika Brzezinski, cuddled up in her flannels on Morning Joe's special Christmas set. In the previous segment, Joe Scarborough had grilled Sean Spicer, whom President-elect Trump yesterday named as his White House spokesman, over Trump's tweet of yesterday in which he said that the US needed to greatly strengthen its nuclear arsenal. Spicer repeatedly refused to say that the Trump tweet came in response from a statement by Vladimir Putin, just hours earlier, announcing Russia's intention to strengthen its own nuclear arsenal. When the show returned after a break, Spicer was gone, but Mika and Joe announced that during the break Spicer had been on the phone with Trump, that Mika had posed a question about the nuclear tweet, and that in response Trump told her: "let it be an arms race because we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 21, 2016 49 Comments
"There, I said it. Mark it Down. Write it." That was Joe Scarborough on today's Morning Joe predicting that Republicans will be "wiped out" in the 2018 elections if they govern as far right as the Trump cabinet selections suggest. Scarborough drew the analogy to the 1994, and more specifically to the 2010 midterm elections, when Dems suffered cataclysmic losses after an emboldened Obama admin governed from the left in its first two years. Scarborough misses an important point, in the view of this Insurrectionist. Dems didn't get punished in 2010 because of some abstract notion that they governed too far to the left. They lost because their liberal policies failed. The economy remained in the doldrums. And people could see that Obamacare was heading for failure.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 20, 2016 18 Comments
In the wake of yesterday's terror attacks, including the one in Berlin in which 12 people were killed and many more injured, Donald Trump tweeted that the civilized world must "change thinking." A disdainful Joe Scarborough reacted on today's Morning Joe: "I don't know exactly what the civilized world is going to do about trucks, unless we're going to ban trucks. But again, some of the deadliest attacks have been with vehicles."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 19, 2016 32 Comments
Shades of "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?" . . . On today's Morning Joe, Mike Barnicle claimed that Barack Obama had a "great, outstanding" presidency, "with a few minor ripples like Syria." So the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, traceable to Obama's abandonment of his red line, is a "minor ripple?" How callous can Barnicle be? And as bad as was Obama's failure on Syria, it is just one of a string of fiascos at his feet, from the rise of ISIS, to Iran, Libya, and on the domestic front, a record number of people out of work and on food stamps, and the slowest recovery in modern history.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 15, 2016 12 Comments
This Insurrectionist has been monitoring Morning Joe since its inception. But perhaps never in the ensuing nine years has there been a segment quite so somber as the one that led Wednesday's show. The subject was Aleppo, the images were horrific, and the accusation laid at the feet of President Obama, the Western allies and the UN was that their inaction has led to the slaughter of countless thousands. The segment opened with a statement at the UN by US Ambassador Samantha Power condemning Assad, Russia and Iran. But as Joe Scarborough observed: "those were damning, damning words. But they were damning words of the Obama administration." Scarborough was referring to the fecklessness of the Unites States in the face of the slaughter. Scarborough chillingly reported that "you actually have mothers going to priests saying will God forgive me if I kill my child so ISIS doesn't torture them when they get them and kill them?"

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 13, 2016 13 Comments
"Absolute disaster": that's how Joe Scarborough described the prospect of John Bolton serving as Deputy Secretary of State on today's Morning Joe. Scarborough blamed "neo-cons" for boosting Bolton, singling out Sheldon Adelson. Said Scarborough: "he needs to tell Sheldon Adelson, sorry, I love you buddy, and I'll play blackjack out at your casino, but I can't let you destroy US foreign policy because you like this guy." Scarborough's beef with Bolton focused on his hawkish approach to foreign policy, noting that he was one of the few in the foreign-policy community still saying that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea. Scarborough suggested that Bolton's stance would put him at odds with Trump, who made his opposition to the Iraq war a key element of his campaign.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 12, 2016 6 Comments
The notion that American academia is a liberal bubble and echo chamber is nothing that Legal Insurrection hasn't documented and decried a thousand times. But it is refreshing to hear that complaint coming from the lips . . . of a leading liberal journalist. Today's Morning Joe devoted a segment to self-described liberal Nicholas Kristof's New York Times column, "The Dangers of Echo Chambers on Campus." Key lines: "We liberals . . . too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological . . . We champion tolerance, except for conservatives and evangelical Christians. We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us — so long as they think like us." Also encouraging was the panel's consensus in praise of the column, including by Dems Mika Brzezinski and Harold Ford, Jr., and even from fellow Timesman Jeremy Peters.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 09, 2016 23 Comments
And people fret about Trump trying to control the press? Now we learn about the kind of paranoid control freaks running the Clinton campaign. Mika Brzezinski made a stunning revelation on today's Morning Joe. Mika, a loyal Democrat, said that after she warned that the Clinton campaign was perhaps being arrogant in assuming that the race was over, "I'll just say it: NBC got a call from the campaign. Like I had done something that was journalistically inappropriate or something, and needed to be pulled off the air."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 08, 2016 33 Comments
Donald Trump's nominations have turned out to be a pleasant surprise for some of his biggest conservative critics. That was Joe Scarborough's take on today's Morning Joe. From James Mattis at Defense, to John Kelly at DHS, and now to EPA foe Scott Pruitt . . . at EPA, the President-elect has proposed people with strong records and in a number of cases, strong conservative philosophies. So much so that Scarborough remarked: "How fascinating that the Never Trumpers and the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Bill Kristols, and all the people who were rightly the most skeptical of Donald Trump during the primary, have to sit back going, wow, I would not have gotten this with Jeb or Marco."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 05, 2016 6 Comments
The American foreign-policy establishment is wringing its collective hands over Donald Trump's phone conversation with the President of Taiwan, and his subsequent tweet in which he took China to task for its currency devaluation, tariffs on American products, and military build-up in the South China Sea. But there was some surprising support for Trump's initiative on today's Morning Joe. First, Mark Halperin said this showed that Trump wasn't planning to be a passive "inbox president" [Ed.: sayonara, leading from behind], and that it was a way for the US to get "leverage" on China where we had none before. Joe Scarborough described years of frustration in which every year Congress would extend China's Most Favored Nation status for one year on the proviso that it improved its record, which it never did. Joe concluded that from his perspective and that of millions of Americans, "pushing back a little bit on China not the worst thing for an American leader to finally do.. There was an intriguing end to the segment. Going to break, Morning Joe played a riff from Rush Limbaugh's famous theme song, A nod to a new reality? The era of Trump/Rush?

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 01, 2016 19 Comments
Margaret Thatcher once famously said that "the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." Is that what's happened to the Democratic party? Morning Joe devoted a navel-gazing segment today to the question of where Dems go from here given their loss of the presidency, their failure to take back either house of congress, and their hemorrhaging of governorships and hundreds of state-legislature seats. There was consensus that Nancy Pelosi and her septuagenarian cohort in the Dem leadership were past their sell-by dates. But the bigger problem that was posed was the lack of a Dem agenda, and the suggestion that the Dems need to come up with "new ideas." One Dem panelist claimed "we do have some of those" ideas, but neither he nor anyone else could describe them in any detail. And therein lies the looming disaster for the Dems.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on November 29, 2016 46 Comments
Early in this presidential election cycle, Mika Brzezinski was a big Elizabeth Warren booster, repeatedly urging the Massachusetts senator to throw her hat into the ring. So it was nothing short of stunning to see Brzezinski go on a blistering attack against Warren on today's Morning Joe. The segment began with a clip of Warren in essence declaring war on Republicans, claiming Dems had won more presidential and senatorial votes, and declaring that they didn't intend to "whimper, whine or grovel." Wondered Mika: "do you lead with anger? . . I am getting tired of this act." "There's an anger there that was shrill . . . unmeasured and almost unhinged. It's not going to work."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on November 28, 2016 40 Comments
When I suggested yesterday that Kellyanne Conway was being "less than loyal" to Donald Trump by sharply criticizing Mitt Romney on the Sunday shows, some readers took issue, surmising that Trump himself had encouraged Conway's attacks. But today's Morning Joe reported as Breaking News that two sources at the top of the transition say that Trump is "furious" at Conway for her comments, notably her suggestion that Trump had "betrayed" his supporters by considering Romney for Secretary of State. The sources described Conway as having gone "rogue." Scarborough read a response from Conway in which she called the comments "sexist" and claimed she could have "any job she wants" in the Trump administration.
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