Cliff Notes

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 21st, 2010


Observations:


1) Mika is lost like the volleyball on Castaway. I feel horrible about it because it seems like I’m harping on this crazy bring my notes to class disorganization, and I’m not. She is missing the larger point, that no one is saying it’s the empty set of accomplishment for the White House, but everyone is saying the Houston brain trust most likely to have achieved an early answer to the leak catastrophe was not meaningfully engaged. It’s still not.


Through all of this, I also stand alongside, of all people, opportunist supreme Rudy Giuliani for having the most connecting statement crystallizing this “where are the all-stars” question we all began to mutter a few weeks back. Mika’s attempt to discredit his effort from the show last week is a real killer. None of us are the authority until the thing is stopped. Anyone can be heard who brings us closer to a solution. Giuliani brought us closer to a solution, and your notes prove it. Giuliani made the White House scramble to prove it had been doing this all along, but it was too late. Because the correct notion of assembling the dream team had already evolved and today Jack Welch was talking about the mechanics of an all hands on deck solution, while the White House was providing phone records with the 713 area code.


Additionally, the defense of old activities is politicization of the matter. Who cares? Why can’t our governing body empower the good ideas in a crisis rather than be defensive. It’s not you who is defensive, it’s the White House. You don’t say yes I was calling Haliburton looking for more ideas, you say, here is our plan to take on this best available idea starting today. Thanks for that idea Rudy and Jack, and if anyone else can evolve this process farther, our special hotline for BP oil spill solutions is 800-FIXLEAK.


Thanks also to Costner and Cameron.


2) Through all of this Scarborough is evolving as well. I’ve noticed that he is verging on a-partisan. This pocket that he has managed create is an important new concept in non-partisan punditry. I found most of the back and forth today with Joe and Mika to show Mika far more partisan and Joe objective to a fault, stopping short again of concluding an argument, to allow the opponent to regroup, just in case she can be of value in the fight tomorrow.


This stuff is ground breaking. I have not seen anything more closely resemble a shadow government. For a while I was sort’ve looking at Howard Dean as a shadow Democratic leader, but that is a step down the food chain for what I’m witnessing on Morning Joe right now. The long format, the cycle of experts, the dismissal of punditry and the personal evolution away from attack, this is a person acting like a shadow President of the United States. Effectively.


There are a lot of softballs here, Joe Scarborough owns a huge connection to Katrina, and to the Gulf Coast, and is really ‘our man in DC’ for a great deal of the southeastern US. The vacuum created by Michael Steele, Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell and Joe Barton allows Scarborough the high ground called “the only guy from the right who might actually give you a straight answer”. Those other guys are completely bankrupt of ideas, and the youth movement of the Republican party seems to lack next level thinking. Scarborough has found lucidity while 99% of his colleagues in the Republican party don’t know where to look.


It’s the medium. This 3 hour format and basis at the heart of the two biggest drivers of data in the US New York and Washington is causing a Gladwell 10,000 hours phenomenon to occur. It’s not that there aren’t talk shows all over, it’s that this one isn’t echoing, it’s self-correcting. The level of expectation to drive the topics at hand further through the analysis process is increasing beyond any other associated medium. It’s just more.


When I started this thing forever ago, I took exception to the planting of doctrine I disagreed with inside a claim of objectivity. I may continue to hold that exception of Joe Scarborough’s work, but don’t forget, the good stuff crystallized here, the evolution occurred here.


3) Whomever’s idea it was to lengthen Erin Burnett’s segment is a genius. I can’t believe we watched the Morning Joe show cut this person off for 2 years. I hope it was her agent. I hope they laid down an ultimatum that if she doesn’t get to complete 3 sentences before someone pipes in Sammy Hagar that they can do the business news themselves.


I'm sure every day this new version exceeds expectations by 20, the powers that be of Morning Joe and the cast hope Jon Stewart doesn’t do the math here and time lapse all of the IQ points lost to bad planning in the first two years.


I want Erin Burnett’s 3 points per episode back, back to episode one, and I bet everyone in Rockefeller Center, Wall Street and Englewood, NJ do to.


That's all for today, see you tomorrow.