Partner Perkins Tries To Help Us Forget

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for March 19th, 2010


Observations:


1) There was no reason to rush into this column, because Friday had the same twists and turns as the previous 2 days, and I happen to be in Austin at South By Southwest. You do the math. If Peggy Noonan, Joe Scarborough and Eugene Robinson were indeed inventing the wheel on Friday, I would have asked Bill Murray to hold up a sec, and written something, but we all know that didn’t need to happen.


I try very hard not to come at this from the unfair perspective of all of the news that transpires between 9 AM eastern on a shows airing date and when I get around to talking about it. But David Gregory talked about the votes that they were short. Peggy Noonan talked about Obama not making history. The reason the rule is in place is that this stuff looks like blind monkeys did it in retrospect for the opposite happened a short while later.


2) The biggest beef to be had with the Friday show is the continued negative dogma where Joe Scarborough says on the merits this is a bad bill and that it’s a giveaway to the insurers and pharma. It is, but that’s still a false argument. The truth of the matter is that our congress is so compromised that we have to have what looks to the naked eye like a Trojan horse just to get a bill past insurmountable influence to kill it.


If anything, Scarborough should be mad at his own party for having made skeleton keys to the chambers of congress and handing them out to the chamber of commerce. It’s fair to say some of the real nastiness that we have faced in this battle has Billy Tauzin’s signature on it. That the horrific framework of the Bush prescription drug bill was the way of doing business that confronted this congress with the status quo forces all the more entrenched and empowered because of it.


This Scarborough argument seem disingenuous because like the ‘we can’t afford’ it or ‘we should start over’ talking points of the opposition, this argument pretends to be an alternative path where out the gate legislation with an antiseptic regard to special interest is readily available as an option. Joe knows that’s not the case, yet he portrays that it is, thus engaging in truthiness.


3) But thank god the Morning Joe show took a second to beat the living daylights out of State Senator Perkins. This person will now be closeted in focus groups for the foreseeable future to see if there was an angle from which he did not seem like a tool for anti progress. We know I have an issue with the real effect of the small amount of money found to be influencing Senator Perkins, but he did himself zero favors by coming off as delusional as Michelle Bachmann in his segment.


It was nearly a turkey shoot save the restraint from the cast of the show. There was a real danger of piling on. It’s like we always say when it’s a person in over their head, just let them talk. And with each reason, it seemed a more shameful obstruction than before Perkins had ever appeared. As if he was making the case for the other side: “yes I am stopping this great program and looking for falsehoods to challenge it with’.


The debate turned out to be a non event though as it became like arguing with a 5 year old, you risk losing if you try and use the facts or rationality in the face of none. The end note of ‘let’s partner to solve this problem’ is a laughable way to conclude a contest that was really too one sided to move forward from.


Now that this person has been exposed, can’t we just force him to the side and move on? I’m sure his publicist and campaign manager would like that.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.