June 13th seems like a few years back, not merely a few months, however it stuck out for me because that day’s show had Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough go into a rant promising a “massive Democratic wave this fall.” Joe even held up a newspaper to confirm the date, just like a hostage video; which in some ways describes Morning Joe fairly well.
As I had posted at the time: Challenge accepted.
In service to keeping Joe honest on his prediction, I watched the entire three hours of his show this morning.
Please thank me for my service.
As I suspected, Joe did not mention his June prediction once, although he did show a clip from the show made on the same day, one of Mark Sanford pouting after he lost his primary race, but reminding everyone of his big “massive democratic wave?” No chance.
Of course I had made my own predictions about how the mid-term races were going to play out; the Republicans would maintain control of the House and the Senate. So how did I do? Well I only got that half right. The Democrats took the House, gaining 34 seats, while the Republicans maintained control, and gained seats, in the Senate.
2014: 13 Democratic House seats were lost, from 201 to 188
2012: 62 Democratic House seats were lost, from 256 to 193
President Bush (R):
2006: 30 Republican House seats were lost, from 232 to 202
2002: 8 Republican House seats were gained, from 221 to 229
President Clinton (D):
1998: 5 Democratic House seats gained, from 206 to 211
1994: 54 Democratic House seats lost, from 258 to 204
So based on recent history, it’s pretty obvious that there was an opposition party “wave” in 2012 and 1994 for the Republicans. Democrats have made up for that in Presidential year elections, but even in bad years for Republicans, the Democrats have not been able to reproduce a mid-term wave. But a 34+ gain for Democrats this year is fairly equivalent to the damage Republicans took in 2006.
In other words, it was a fairly normal mid-term election. It seems that normalcy was the biggest surprise of all.
Amidst the usual freak-outs and hair pulling about Trump, North Korea, Trump, Mueller, Trump, the RUSSIANS, and of course Trump, Joe Scarborough had time to be fumed at Trump for yet another reason: This time it’s personal. Joe’s good personal friend Mark Sanford lost his House seat primary to pro-Trumper Katie Arrington. Whether or not Trump’s tweet calling Sanford “unhelpful” and saying he was better off in Argentina had anything to do with it is hard to say, but it sure wasn’t helpful to Sanford. This of course led to another amusing unhinged rant by Joe. Check this out!
There is a lot to unpack in this ten minute segment, too much in fact! But what I wanted to focus on starts at around the 8:30 mark, when Joe declares his prediction, that there will be a “massive Democratic wave this fall.”
You heard it here first folks (because few people other than me watch the show).
I’ve also made a prediction, noted here, that there will NOT be a “massive Democratic wave” and that the GOP will keep control of the House. So who is the better political analyst, Joe Scarborough or me? Time will tell, but if I’m right, Joe should fly me to New York and feed me, and if I’m wrong, I’ll write a mea culpa on my inaccurate prediction.
Breaking news from the who-the-hell-cares department, but MSNBC token Republican Joe Scarborough, of the Morning Joe show, has left the Republican Party. . . I’m shocked, shocked I say!
Actually I really was shocked. I thought Scarborough left the Republicans years ago. He didn’t vote for the Republican nominee not just last year, in 2016, but the last go around, in 2012. If you never vote for Republicans, on what basis do you call yourself one? Well maybe he was an “MSNBC Republican.” If someone’s primary political issue is gun control and their most hated senator is Texas Senator Ted Cruz, you are either Senator Diane Feinstein or… “Conservative” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. But Joe’s left leaning positions aren’t new. I used to think Joe was trying to just keep his job. MSNBC did fire Pat Buchanan for driving while conservative, so I figured, if you like those nice paychecks, you have to sing their tune.
When the network takes an editorial position, they can count on Joe to follow along loyally. The key to that is to join, or as is often the case, lead, the mob. Joe is the first one to pick up the torch and pitchfork and begin to emote, throwing logic and reason to the wind and justfeel. He did it with Newtown, with Joe calling for tight gun control regulations (they did this daily on the show for almost 6 months after the shooting). If there is any incident that generates a purely emotional mob response Joe is there for it.
The Gabby Giffords shooting? He was there to warn the right to stop targeting innocent lefty politicians. He joined in blaming Palin and the Tea Party for the shooting.
Trayvon Martin? He joined the network in emoting about tea and skittles over and over again, even while his network was editing 911 calls from the shooting.
Ground Zero Mosque? He demanded that be built too.
So the reason why Joe Scarborough can make it on MSNBC as a Republican is because he has been a faithful team player. But now that he’s come out of the closet, he doesn’t need that. It turns out that he can now to be free to be himself: A confused guy undergoing a mid-life crisis. How else to explain first the affair, then divorce, and now engagement to co-host Mika Brzezinski? And now a ridiculous “music” career, including Manhattan gigs and music videos. Videos mind you, that he, without the least bit of shame, airs on his show.
As for Joe’s affair and divorce, each marriage is a mystery, so maybe I shouldn’t judge that, but I feel perfectly free to judge falling into the arms of Brzezinski. Without claiming any psychic powers, I can tell you that on his deathbed he’ll regard his affair and engagement to Brzezinski as his biggest mistake (assuming he didn’t kill that intern in his office in Pensacola).
And yet I’ve been a long time viewer to Morning Joe. For all the flaws of its hosts, it’s been different than any other dull and dumbed down morning show. It’s provided some drama, such as when Mika and Joe got into a fight when she called him a chauvinist (I didn’t know at the time it was flirtation), and Yuval Levin discussing the Burkean and Paine traditions of American political thought. You can’t get that on the Today Show. And Joe Scarborough did great work in eviscerating Paul Krugman on a debate on the Charlie Rose Show. It’s always entertaining when a University of Alabama grad, ex-Politician, and TV host, gets the better of a New York Times columnist and Professor of Economics in his own field.
So while I’ve enjoyed the longer conversational style aspects of Morning Joe; the show’s #nevertrump descent into pure snarkfest had ruined what was formerly a useful show, and turned it into a 3 hour morning long Cobert Show, only without the attempts at humor, all the while the main host acts out his mid-life crisis on live TV.
But as Joe pursues establishment approval that will never come, no matter how much he debases himself, he won’t be missed on the right, even if he takes all 12 or “Joe Scarborough Republicans” with him.
So bye Joe.
But, do we get anything in trade? If we’re trading Joe to the left, does the left have anything to offer us? Well as a matter of fact…
You may not have heard of Laci Green, particularly if you’re over thirty and don’t follow Social Justice Warrior intersectional feminism (and who does?) but in the world of YouTube, she’s a big star. Her feminist blogger YouTube channel has a million and a half subscribers and 146 million views. That’s a big audience for a lot of feminist yammering about Planned Parenthood and pansexuality. But then something weird happened earlier this year…
Suddenly Laci was talking about meeting some anti-feminist video bloggers and listening to different perspectives. “Listening to different perspectives” is exactly the opposite of what’s typical on the left these days, and particularly among the SJW set. Why oh why would she suddenly be interested in “different perspectives” that run counter to not just her world view and politics, but her business model?
You guessed it, she met a guy. And the guy she met is an anti-feminist you tuber who goes by the name of Chris Ray Gun. If you were a publicist, you could hardly craft a better Romeo & Juliet storyline. The MTV movie practically writes itself. In the world of you tube, Chris Ray Gun is a much smaller commodity than Laci Green is, but at almost half a million subscribers, he’s still a pretty big deal. But Chris shows no signs of reconsidering intersectional feminism, Laci is the one with her worldview shattered.
But that shattering is a long term process and as Laci struggles to deal with other perspectives on feminism than the ones she picked up at Berkeley, she’s dealing with the blowback of rethinking her worldview. One can’t predict where that will lead. With Joe Scarborough, once he began the process of status seeking among the establishment, the conversion was only going to go one way. But a move to the right is a different story. That’s usually with the understanding that, as Whitaker Chambers thought, that it’s a defection to a losing side. And you lose everything else as well, your old friends and your old, respected position. In Laci Green’s case, it could cost her a business. So the process of conversion isn’t assured. On the other hand, trading Joe Scarborough; for even a feminist who is willing to have a conversation; is more than a fair trade in my opinion.
Our old buddy Anand Giridharadas was back on Morning Joe, and boy how the tables have turned. I wrote in October how New York Times writer Giridharadas, on a Morning Joe appearance, couldn’t wait for the post election score settling with his arch enemy, white men.
“I think the people who went that way and that Trump movement and perhaps supported things about women they don’t actually support or supported things about bashing Muslims that they don’t in their deepest of hearts support, need to think about the fact that globalization and all of that was hard on everybody. It wasn’t just hard on White guys. For some reason, women lost their jobs in globalization, Black and Brown people lost their jobs in globalization, and managed not to lash out. I think there needs to be a reckoning, frankly, with white manhood in this country.”
But now the tables have turned, and with a Trump victory, Giridharadas has gone from a Brownshirt inciting a Caucasian Kristallnacht to shivering in fear in a Dutch attic. Enjoy:
When Joe Scarborough has to be the voice of reason, “Hitler is not coming back,” then you know that someone’s gone off the deep end. But however much I’m enjoying the schadenfreude of Giridharadas having a special snowflake breakdown on television, it serves as a reminder that however much he now fears internment camps, Muslim banning, and all the rest, he’s the type of person who either thinks that you have your hands on his throat, or he’s going to have his hands on your throat. If the tables had been turned, and Hillary had won, he would have been the first one urging internment camps and whatever final solution he feels appropriate to handle that pesky white male problem.
Demography is destiny and eventually the Democrats will be back in power. And when they are, there will be Anand Giridharadas and others like him urging on their own pogrom.
When it comes to anti white racism, I admit I’ve been pretty tolerant of it. Mostly because anti white racism can be pretty funny so it’s hard to take seriously. As anyone who has perused Salon, the website for white people who hate white people; can tell you, it’s sometimes hard not to get a good laugh out of it. It’s hard to remember now, but at one time Salon used to be a legitimate and respectable magazine. But with stories like, White Men Must be Stopped,White Guys are Killing Us, America’s Angriest White Men, GOP base is still white and aging, and Time to Profile White Men; even the parody twitter account “Salon.com” has had difficulty topping the real articles and has often resorted to re-tweeting Salon’s real tweets.
Of course when real journalists do it, it’s slightly less funny, such as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, whose article, On a Welcome End to American Whiteness, cheers for the day of demographic apocalypse for white people in America. Milbank sees the declining white population as an opportunity to redo American culture, to get rid of an “excess of individualism, short-term thinking and prioritizing of rights over duties.”
Yeah, we wouldn’t want too many rights gumming up the works.
So I suppose I do fundamentally view a major difference between the comic anti white hatred of Salon, ranting Black Nationalists on Youtube, or various SJW’s on college campuses, and legitimate journalists positing their anti white racism in the public sphere without any backlash at all.
That’s why I found myself someone shocked by the comments of New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas on Morning Joe this week. Giridharadas is one of those semi regular guests to the set of the MSNBC show that doesn’t, to my view, seem to offer anything particularly compelling in the way of opinion other than the mouthing of whatever the latest conventional wisdom is. In the case of Giridharadas he also brings some sort of incomprehensible thing going on with his hair. It’s like he’s stacked a couple of bird’s nests up there. I guess that’s his gimmick.
So check out the video at this link of Giridharadas.
Or I’ll just transcribe the relevant comments. When co-host and white male Willie Geist asked Giridharadas a question about what happens to the frustrations of the people who supported Trump post election, he responded thusly:
“I don’t want to wait for a leader to deal with this energy because I think how badly we went when we don’t deal with each other as human beings. I think every institution needs to do this. I would say to your point, this needs to be a two-way reconciliation, and here’s my suggestion for kind of each side. I think the elites we’re talking about who relate to understanding this pain, who didn’t see the roots of Trump, need to see it–need to re-engage with What American needs to understand what’s doing on.
I think the people who went that way and that Trump movement and perhaps supported things about women they don’t actually support or supported things about bashing Muslims that they don’t in their deepest of hearts support, need to think about the fact that globalization and all of that was hard on everybody. It wasn’t just hard on White guys. For some reason, women lost their jobs in globalization, Black and Brown people lost their jobs in globalization, and managed not to lash out. I think there needs to be a reckoning, frankly, with white manhood in this country.”
Geist’s reply? “Interesting.”
Putting aside the idea that if globalization is so hard on everyone, why are we doing it, I thought the real take away was, I realized that these guys, the establishment elite types like Milbank and Giridharadas were serious. They really do regard whites as some sort of problem, like an atavistic hold over that’s harshing everyone’s buzz. It’s pretty blatantly racist, but it’s not a racism that anyone particularly cares about.
I’ve been writing about the increase in tribalism and identity politics for years, but it looks like it’s going for a new level. Nothing good will come out of this of course, but now it’s not just that nothing good will come out of this in a general way, but now I feel like I’m being targeted personally. Unfortunately Joe Scarborough recognized the rabbit hole Giridharadas was going down and sidetracked the conversation into one of “reconciliation,” I would have much rather heard Giridharadas elaborate on his point and find out just what exactly he had in mind with his reckoning “with white manhood.”
Mike Street Station 