The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 15th, 2010
Observations:
1) The Morning Joe show did little to solve America’s problems today. It in fact seemed bent on preserving the wedge nature of Sunday talk shows as the substance of it’s Monday program. The Vice Presidential discord was replayed on the show 8 different times and ways as a reference point.
When the panelist went around the room, they all chose Lincoln as their favorite President. Its not lost on the viewer that the Lincoln Presidency has an eerie parallel to modern times as we have grown into two divided populations beholden to a wildly swinging middle independent voter. And that middle independent voter swings so wildly because he has no representation in Washington.
When the independent voter swings one way, the base of the losing party grows militant in their call for a shadow government to view the actions of the nation from their perspective. That is the need that calls Dick Cheney to the podium again and again. That is the antithesis of post election cohesion.
It’s not the progressives that are abandoning Obama, it’s the independent voter. And it’s not because of torture, it’s because the agencies protecting America were asleep at the wheel on Christmas day. It’s not because of a “Government takeover” of health care, it’s because the false reform plan was a lobbyist giveway with the Democrats acting like the untrustworthy Republicans that had just been shown the door.
No one is serving the consensus population, and that population is growing.
2) In this process of neither party seeming particularly capable of trustworthy governing, it’s fair to say that this angry middle voter is susceptible to distortions planted in the news by either party’s pandering. Miranda has become a rallying cry because Scott Brown used it to great effect to symbolize inefficiency in the steps taken to secure the homeland. That word was a leading edge similar to ‘death panels’. It has since been marginalized amongst the pundits, but the damage to the middle voter is a lagging scar no longer based in facts on the ground. Just like ‘death panels’.
Miranda rights to enemy combatants is an endangered species because the middle voter now sees it as the reason we won’t stop the next attack. If you put David Ignatius under truth serum, he would likely say that rather than Miranda, it’s bitter infighting causing ruptured information flow between security agencies that will victimize this country’s defense. The show today highlighted a symptom of that with Joe Scarborough centering his discussion of the matter around Miranda symbolizing the disintegration of the CIA interrogation program. Read that again. One agency prevails over another agency, and the left out entity has thrown it’s hands up.
Do you feel safer?
Yea, I would like that CIA option back, too. But is the answer really to swing the middle voter with a malfeasance of the Miranda story? Is this an indication of the health of this country as a voter and government? If we recently allowed some credence to the theory that the voter has been thrown into an irrational state and shown positively schizophrenic voting patterns, what are we to expect as a result if a poll can be found that Americans want Miranda out, but also want the best method possible, which might include Miranda?
We are creating this irrationality. Morning Joe got nabbed for the Mark Penn appearance on the show, unrelated to this subject but important for the concept, so as a penance, it should be sure that it’s a forum for consensus, not a forum for lobbyists to come on under the guise of analysis and drive red herring sound bites into wedge issues bent on being a domestic media civil war. And it should be even more careful not to embody that wedge building concept via it’s own cast and writing.
3) If the stock market would’ve opened today, it would’ve fallen 500 points. Germany is pulling out of the Greece bailout. Goldman Sachs has been found to be a chief participant in hidden activities bent on reducing the visibility of sovereign debt it was selling in markets it makes.
Tomorrow, it remains to be seen if there is any way to recover from this parade of negative news from across the pond. Early in the show, Mika alluded to a story regarding this, yet the show never covered in in the 3 hours.
Maybe the show could’ve reshown the Biden - Cheney wedge tournament 2 less times, and talked about a multi-trillion dollar wealth shift in the making instead?
You solved little, developed no consensus, highlighted the extreme edges most prominently, and resolved that the two parties should try and talk out their differences. All this while missing some important stories going on elsewhere.
Am I the only one who wants more out of Morning Joe?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment