Wednesday, July 27, 2016

The RNC had Fonzie's Cousin Chachi but Morning Joe & the DNC Have Jumped the Shark

Truly one of the most sycophantic panel discussions was pathetically displayed Tuesday during Morning Joe. It started with sucking up to Mrs. Obama’s factually weak speech in which she again implied that slaves built the White House, which is only marginally true as while some slaves were used most of the work was done by skilled craftsman and paid labor by immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, England and Germany. She also challenged those who question the citizenship of her husband yet would the Morning Joe panel point out that the smear campaign on the President’s nationality began in the 2008 Clinton campaign or that Barack Obama himself said he was Kenyan in his first book? While the claim turned out to be not true and he was born in Hawaii why is it wrong to take him at his word when he said he wasn’t American? And while she was up there saying how “America is already great” she might have explained why the first time she was proud of America was after her husband was elected president.
The panel then went on to again bring up the claims that Mrs. Trump plagiarized her speech, another only partially true claim as only about 7% the speech was taken from the First Lady’s previous speech. Yes it was partially plagiarized and it is okay to point that out but never any mentions of Hillary’s previous acts of plagiarism or that Morning Joe employs former Boston Globe serial plagiarist Mike Barnicle; a bit of the pot calling the kettle black. Did the panel point out plagiarism when the Bernie supporters used the Trump supporters’ chant of “lock her up”?
The subject then turned to the unproven claims that Russia is behind the DNC email hack in order to help Trump. No proof, only mere conjecture. Again not the merest mention of the $145 million Russian business interests “donated” to the Clinton Family Foundation or the criminally high speaking fees paid by Russian groups to Bill Clinton after the dubious sale of American uranium reserves to Russia that was approved by Hillary’s State Department over the objections of some lawmakers.
They were critical of Patricia Smith, mother of slain Benghazi U.S. Embassy employee Sean Smith, for speaking at the RNC yet not a peep about the mother of Michael Brown, you know the man that beat up a convenience store clerk while stealing cigarettes and then proceeded down the street until he was stopped by a police officer that he then attacked and the tried take the officer’s gun.
I have been a Morning Joe viewer (and podcast listener while currently working in Europe) since 2007 but there are times when they truly jump the shark. I expect the panelists to be way out in left field but Joe and Mika are usually fairly centrist voices of reason that descended down into an unseemly suck-up fest that was embarrassingly painful to watch.