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.

Grasping At Straws

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for March 11th, 2010


Observations:


1) The ad goes ‘I can tell when they’re lying’, but decorum prevailed when Senator Kirsten Gillibrand came on the show and said she hadn’t switched on gay marriage or gun control. She has obviously switched on both positions and used political doublespeak like ‘a widening of focus’ to cover both sides of an issue like gun control.


So there was your moment, and you had the trademark Joe Scarborough look on your face as you weighed your options, then nothing. I doubt that Chris Matthews or Jon Stewart would’ve let that pass. Who wins? Does decorum win, or make the viewer lose? Time will tell as I’m sure that your editors are furiously at work looking for then and now video so that you can blanket a future show with your take.


But politics is not gotcha on video, it’s the visceral in person resistance to getting bulldozed on an issue on live television. And the results are in.


2) I’m also not so sure that a paltry $13,250 is the equivalent of the Nixon tapes on this issue of State Senator Perkins obstructing charter schools on behalf of unions. I 100% agree with your take that obstruction is occurring and he is the likely source. But that amount of money is just not a palpable case for a smoking gun.


Also, this story and your rants about charter schools should have been better connected to the Kansas City school district story. Andrew Ross Sorkin makes a valid point that this sort of cost and budget catastrophe is the pain we are all enduring, seemingly invisibly, at the state level. You talk about attrition from district making draconian cuts, Ross talks about pervasive cuts everywhere, and then you talk separately about how there is massive demand for charter schools.


I honestly feel like you should be able to connect these issues better. Why not debate whether a giant cut like that facing Kansas City might actually be an opening for a charter system to fill those closed schools on a high demand basis? Why not debate that those opposing charter conversions face Kansas City’s reality by the virtue of their opposition?


My problem with Ross’ take and the Union and Senator Perkins and budgets in general, is there is no foresight that would create revenue streams, just bad management and then cuts at the end to balance bad budgets. By the time it’s cuts it’s too late. Somewhere along the way was an unduly prioritized dirty contract payment or privatization scheme that got paid, then the least protected people, teachers and children, are the cuts to equate.


I’m with you on charter schools, just don’t forget to turn over all the rocks.


3) This looking for meaning in when Nancy Pelosi knew about Rep. Massa is Joe Scarborough grasping at straws. It does the Republicans no good at all to go with “see, the Dems did it too” because it only highlights how bad it was in 2006, instead of making the Democrats stew in their own juices. Bad strategy, and then, you risk finding out that this case was very different, and the why is that Foley was preying on pages. Do you really want to relive that horror of horrors?


Chuck Todd basically told you that your strong misinterpretation of this timeline was going nowhere, you should probably listen to him.


All this while there was a mega scandal right in front of you. Why, when Obama starts taking earmarks out of the health care bill are you not asking if the administration will do a phase two of this process and remove sweetheart deals for pharma and insurers?


Ed Shultz asked openly last week if the fix was in, if the reason some of the anti insurance, anti pharma stuff like state lines and Canadian drug importation stayed out of this bill was by virtue of a back room administration deal. You have a giant opening on shows like today, and it befuddles the viewer to see that opportunity missed.


You could possibly find redemption in the fact that a stand alone repeal of health insurance anti trust exemption is out there. Don’t you think after all of the megaphone work on that issue that Morning Joe has done, that this bill deserves some coverage?


I do.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.