The Morning Joe Torture Test

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 8th, 2010


Observations:


1) While it may have felt good to get Dylan Ratigan on the set, it accomplished very little. There he was like a frustrated 5 year old, frustrated because the words aren’t serving the ideas racing about his head, and he was trying to ask the uber-polished Rudy Giuliani a simple question. “Mr. Giuliani, if it was your watch, what would you do going forward 10 years”. But alas, by the time the question got out, he had worn out everyone with endless qualifications, and the music was playing. But this isn’t about Dylan, it’s about Mika and Joe, who had an opportunity to listen to Giuliani hedge at Obama’s expense and then redirect him to Dylan’s intent. “That’s great Mr. Mayor, but what would you do going forward 10 years, what are your big ideas?”


Dylan desperately needs a teaching moment, his thought process is leading edge, but the machine is broken. Over time Joe and Mika (and Mike and Willie?) have become ace question/grenade lobbers, and they need to get that skill transferred to Mr. Ratigan.


2) I feel like there was a great equalizing force between the show today and the prior show that elicited the complaint of bias on it’s reporting of Democratic election prognoses. Joe Conason leveled the playing field and it appeared convinced even Joe Scarborough that the right is overcounting its support and underestimating its split.


The additional daily dose of Micheal Steele reporting points to a remarkable move towards realistic expectations on behalf of those on the right, I mean, he almost sounds like DNC era Howard Dean for the opposition. Howard will be on the show on Monday and it would be a fair subject to try and define if Michael Steele is “doing what Howard would do” for the Republicans.


I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid to the extent that I think Steele has dropped agenda-speak and that the Republicans are now realizing that they’ll have to separate distant agenda items like abortion and fiscal responsibility to ever win the middle again. But what candidates like mega conservative Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania are doing is trying to sway the conversation away from base baiting subjects. He has given interviews to left leaning publications and had the content been exclusively economic, leaving out some fairly important hate mongering subjects, in an effort to appeal to middle voters, like myself, who put fiscal leanings of some Republicans in high regard, but litmus them away upon discovering their dark social restriction.


A while ago, Joe Scarborough made a very valid point, that there is an equation where you can agree explicitly and up front, to remove a nasty albatross like abortion from a discussion or even a platform, for a term, in order to focus solely on other priorities if you were deemed to be the best leader for the accomplishment of those other priorities. That concept, if Michael Steele ever mastered it, would do more to re-unify the Republican party based on his established program, than anything else.


3) San Diego got a shout out when Ron Insana talked about the available gold rush of real estate bargains in cities like this one. It’s a fact. I saw a house with a horizon view of the ocean go in north San Diego country last month for less than $300,000. It’s unreal, but also an equation. The big negative for this area for a long time is unless you’re married to the service industry, the jobs are there, just not fulfilling or an exercise in career growth. Houses a fraction of the size of the one above are still getting $800,000 2 counties north because a job there means 3 times as much as a job here.


When you’re cutting jobs at your mega company, you close the esoteric satellite operations first, and doesn’t that sound like San Diego? Until that changes, yea you can buy some investment houses and rent them to San Diego State students, but there is little opportunity to look at this region as our state’s Oregon.


4) The Morning Joe torture is when you bring a guest on at the top of the hour, and then get to him at 15 past the hour, and that’s after making him watch a fight from "Jersey Shore". If he doesn’t tell you all the information you want right on cue, you can move your torture to a waterboarding level by asking him what he thought of the fight on "Jersey Shore". If that doesn’t work, play the music and show the Koalas.


That’s Stern meets Clockwork Orange level stuff and today I thought it was done on purpose because it was Joe Conason, then I remembered you did it to Richard Haas. I am alerting Geneva.



That’s all for today, see you Monday