The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 30th, 2010
Observations:
1) If anyone sees anything other than great news out of the Glenn Beck debacle over the weekend, I may not be able to help you. The right is agitated and they want change now. But the fact is despite a spoiled brat mentality that covers the entire right of center spectrum, there is no leader. I know the feeling, because I lived it for 6+ years from the other side. John Kerry? Nothing elicits helplessness more fiercely than having the ‘for it before I was against it’ guy running your squad.
Glenn is out there because of the opportunity brought on by the absence of anyone approximating leadership in the Republican Party. Even if there were an heir apparent, his advisers would have him in an ice cave in Saskatchewan avoiding the recent implosion of the right into its two base parts. Recently is misleading, because the right has been best described as a poster child for identity crisis for the better part of a decade. Let gays in or persecute? Brown skinned Republicans or refuge for those of European descent? Like or dislike Eric Rudolph? All of these seemingly absurd questions show the peril of wanting to be on the right side of humanity without offending the extreme base of the party.
Enter master of doublespeak Glenn Beck. I know nothing of this man, proudly. When I try to watch the guys show, anything else seems more entertaining or informative. I basically get the feeling he is just guessing as he goes along with a piece of chalk in his hand. But look, there’s nothing hiding the fact that Rupert and Roger don’t want him actually making sense or his show even watchable. The more of a catacomb of self serving code that the show is, the more of a convenient device it is to be all things to all of the people mentioned above. There were brown skinned people at the rally and people who didn’t like having brown skinned people, well, at the rally. They were too confused by a lack of any real agenda to question why they were in the same circumstance without a partition.
My favorite fact overviewing the rally was the instruction sent out beforehand to avoid signage. It might as well have said: 'make Joe Scarborough guess your stand on the 2nd amendment, don’t make it obvious that you’re a 99.9% over my dead body crowd'. It was very hard to abide by that instruction. The Toby Keith garb was an overwhelming trend.
I can’t wait. Next, Glenn will say “let’s all meet just over the Potomac in Manassas and settle this thing once and for all”. The population is just weak enough right now because of everything that Glenn Beck is not talking about, to believe that might be the answer.
Lead to your untimely demise by a puppet being strung along by an Australian guy, you really need a leader to emerge prior.
2) Joe Scarborough has declared war on Paul Krugman. Krugman is the whipping post for Scarborough’s scathing dismissal of all things John Maynard Keynes. Amazingly, Scarborough gets away with this despite having offered nearly zero solutions of his own. These are difficult times and what this war on Krugman and Keynes embodies is a disastrous demonizing process when we need solutions and everything should be on the table.
Keynes does not equal stimulus in his theoretical entirety. In fact the thing I find the most interesting about Keynes has to do with regulatory policy. Keynes was for significant segmentation of the financial services and would have been absolutely horrified at the black box that currently best describes the lawlessness that the entire industry operates under. Keynes also has another key ingredient: that the private financial sector has an obligation towards progressing a national goal of full employment.
Now as you digest those two things, ponder that they are higher order elements of Keynesian theory than stimulus to replace spending in a time of crisis. So if you want to wage a war on Krugman and Keynes, you owe your subscribers more than the sound bite sensibility you have exhibited in your vitriolic dismissal of these two great economists.
If you think Krugman called you stupid or insane, you know he has zero inhibition about coming on your show to shine a light on the circumstance or context of that. I agree with the Joe Scarborough assertion that once you base your argument in one dimensional insults like this, the argument is essentially over because you’ve stated that the other side is void of credibility. The bottom line is if the answer really does lie inclusive of some of the things these two historically credible people endorse, they need you to help explain it to the lost souls described in section #1 above.
Those guys around you with economic bonifides: Sorkin, Sachs, etc; I don’t think they would endorse a cold shoulder where a significant part of the collective answer might lie. Ask them.
3) You guys have really lost the plot as it pertains to Erin Burnett. The top 3 things got weighted down by a bunch of Cramer-esque props, and now she is back to fighting to get any intelligent discussion going. Mr. Licht, you had something, you had a path to getting Erin to be an asset, and then it kept getting tinkered with. Can’t you get enough control of the show to not lose assets like this with histrionics as the culprit?
We had this discussion a long time ago when the show got bent on features and forgot to cover the news. This is a microcosm of that discussion. Even when you watch Erin on CNBC she rarely gets an opportunity to wax philosophical on what she sees. You own the real estate ideally equipped to get that conversation from her, void of all the necessary CNBC automations, just what she thinks about things. Yet you let it slip away into a cooking show day after day.
It was a notable evolution of the show just minutes earlier when Howard Dean was done with a segment, and by the reverse magic of television did not have to disappear, in fact, reappearing magically to provide balance to at least two more segments. I remember a few weeks ago when the segment Dean was on was notably short, or shortened. Dean is a cornucopia of knowledge from the other side, and I think it was a great part of the show today when Willie Geist got a chance to ask Howard what he thought of Mark Halperin’s negative election prognosis for Democrats in November.
If you recall I was furious about the Halperin prognosis. But look at the track record of the Morning Joe show: health care has no chance, it’s Hillary for sure in '08, I’m sure there’s more, but the point is, you aren’t very good at prognoses regarding the Democrats, because your cast leader is on the other side. He is projecting his wish list on the Democrats, takes his pocket calculator with him, and needs an azimuth check by guys like Howard Dean periodically.
You have people like Dean and Burnett surrounding you, be sure you aren’t cutting them off and then filling in the blanks with what you wish they would have said or predicted.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Showing posts with label glenn beck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label glenn beck. Show all posts
Monday, August 30, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
30 Seconds To Mars And Back
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 8th, 2010
Observations:
1) The Morning Joe show and its long list of esteemed guest are equally terrified of Sarah Palin. The anxiety comes from that sinking feeling that the cast, like everyone else, can’t figure it out. I’ll try and provide a public service here so we can suspend our collective Palinioa.
Sarah Palin is the missing link between Rush Limbaugh, the Roger Ailes consortium of tail gunners, and the headless horseman that is the Republican party. Because the base can’t be seen publicly looking towards Rush or Beck as it’s leader, Palin is as close as the establishment can come to a figurehead currently. The real leadership centers around Mitt Romney, but his personality is as amorphous the bad guy on Terminator, so strategically, the party needs a den mother to placate the base. With their focus on a red herring billboard like Palin, the party can move behind the scenes to get off the mat and set up their 2012 move.
Palin is in need of something that Peggy Noonan hit on today. She needs to be an identical player to George W. Bush, an enabler friendly Manchurian. There is no doubt that even with as much Palin bashing as is going on, Bush and Palin are intellectual equivalents. But the Steve Schmidt interactions prove that she will spend the Romney years being taught to work within the enabler machine while coddling the base that is perpetually scared to death by Ailes, Beck and Limbaugh.
2) Why debate Steve Forbes? Joe Scarborough has always brought in the dangerous politicization of the deficit, the economy, the stimulus, the issues that needed to be in the hands of economic surgeons. So Forbes is preaching to the choir in his segment looking at JS and Peggy Noonan. No one in the audience thought for even one second that three Reagan-ites were going to cite Paul Krugman or Keynsian principle to give that conversation depth. In the same hour you had Matthew Bishop and Michael Green arguing that side of things, albeit with the telegenics of a soap dish. But the show needs to do a better job of connecting the dots lest it perpetuates playing to both sides blindly and thus being an engine of voter irrationality.
What is the voter irrationality? A population that simultaneously supports and vilifies deficits, stimulus, healthcare, Afghanistan, and a pro life advertisement to an impossible 60th percentile. Where do they get that from? ‘Stop printing money’ at 8:11 and take rational long term steps like attacking joblessness and rebuilding infrastructure at 8:43 will always manufacture irrationality.
An interesting article came out over the weekend showing that we are as a voting body slapping our own face irrationally by swinging from right to left and back wildly. One of the specific things talked about is how necessary deficits during the managing of an economic recovery face unfair and debilitating headwinds by the aforementioned politicization. Joe Scarborough, although agreeable enough, just can’t help himself when attacking deficit spending to this end, and it’s debatable whether his altruism on the subject isn’t actually a significant part of the problem.
3) This year for Christmas I got a Phillip Rivers no. 17 jersey. No doubt Rivers is an elite quarterback and his team is in that tough soul searching part where they figure out how to get a Super Bowl ring. A position that Peyton Manning was in for years before getting his single ring.
I never wore that jersey. I never had a chance to. The Jets came and that was it. But rolling around all season long and at every game I went to in the last 6 years was the powder blue no. 9 Brees jersey from his stint as a Charger.
Brees was the beginning of the current Chargers ‘win way more then they lose’ era. It had a difficult end, and in fact the Chargers made the right decision at the time when they let him exit via free agency. The mechanics of the injury that Brees had made his recovery either questionable at all, or left him as a highly paid assistant coach waiting for 100% to recur. Not to mention that the injury occurred in a meaningless spot at the end of a meaningless game ending a meaningless season. Marty Schottenheimer left Drew Brees in that week 17 game versus the Denver Broncos because he knew that Brees was gone even before the injury and it was more important not to risk injury in that setting to the heir apparent Phillip Rivers.
But via the miracle that happens every once in a while, Brees didn’t just rehabilitate, he came back better. In repairing his shoulder and rehabbing, it is unquestionable that Drew Brees can throw the ball 20 yards further than he ever could, and with 50% better strength, and all that alongside a character that just seems superhuman to the naked eye. Character that would have gone a long way in the Chargers locker room 3 weeks ago.
I think I’ll trot that no. 9 jersey out this offseason for a 6 month victory lap. It will help lessen the sting of a huge missed opportunity for the Chargers knowing when we get there, Brees will have been part of that story too.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) The Morning Joe show and its long list of esteemed guest are equally terrified of Sarah Palin. The anxiety comes from that sinking feeling that the cast, like everyone else, can’t figure it out. I’ll try and provide a public service here so we can suspend our collective Palinioa.
Sarah Palin is the missing link between Rush Limbaugh, the Roger Ailes consortium of tail gunners, and the headless horseman that is the Republican party. Because the base can’t be seen publicly looking towards Rush or Beck as it’s leader, Palin is as close as the establishment can come to a figurehead currently. The real leadership centers around Mitt Romney, but his personality is as amorphous the bad guy on Terminator, so strategically, the party needs a den mother to placate the base. With their focus on a red herring billboard like Palin, the party can move behind the scenes to get off the mat and set up their 2012 move.
Palin is in need of something that Peggy Noonan hit on today. She needs to be an identical player to George W. Bush, an enabler friendly Manchurian. There is no doubt that even with as much Palin bashing as is going on, Bush and Palin are intellectual equivalents. But the Steve Schmidt interactions prove that she will spend the Romney years being taught to work within the enabler machine while coddling the base that is perpetually scared to death by Ailes, Beck and Limbaugh.
2) Why debate Steve Forbes? Joe Scarborough has always brought in the dangerous politicization of the deficit, the economy, the stimulus, the issues that needed to be in the hands of economic surgeons. So Forbes is preaching to the choir in his segment looking at JS and Peggy Noonan. No one in the audience thought for even one second that three Reagan-ites were going to cite Paul Krugman or Keynsian principle to give that conversation depth. In the same hour you had Matthew Bishop and Michael Green arguing that side of things, albeit with the telegenics of a soap dish. But the show needs to do a better job of connecting the dots lest it perpetuates playing to both sides blindly and thus being an engine of voter irrationality.
What is the voter irrationality? A population that simultaneously supports and vilifies deficits, stimulus, healthcare, Afghanistan, and a pro life advertisement to an impossible 60th percentile. Where do they get that from? ‘Stop printing money’ at 8:11 and take rational long term steps like attacking joblessness and rebuilding infrastructure at 8:43 will always manufacture irrationality.
An interesting article came out over the weekend showing that we are as a voting body slapping our own face irrationally by swinging from right to left and back wildly. One of the specific things talked about is how necessary deficits during the managing of an economic recovery face unfair and debilitating headwinds by the aforementioned politicization. Joe Scarborough, although agreeable enough, just can’t help himself when attacking deficit spending to this end, and it’s debatable whether his altruism on the subject isn’t actually a significant part of the problem.
3) This year for Christmas I got a Phillip Rivers no. 17 jersey. No doubt Rivers is an elite quarterback and his team is in that tough soul searching part where they figure out how to get a Super Bowl ring. A position that Peyton Manning was in for years before getting his single ring.
I never wore that jersey. I never had a chance to. The Jets came and that was it. But rolling around all season long and at every game I went to in the last 6 years was the powder blue no. 9 Brees jersey from his stint as a Charger.
Brees was the beginning of the current Chargers ‘win way more then they lose’ era. It had a difficult end, and in fact the Chargers made the right decision at the time when they let him exit via free agency. The mechanics of the injury that Brees had made his recovery either questionable at all, or left him as a highly paid assistant coach waiting for 100% to recur. Not to mention that the injury occurred in a meaningless spot at the end of a meaningless game ending a meaningless season. Marty Schottenheimer left Drew Brees in that week 17 game versus the Denver Broncos because he knew that Brees was gone even before the injury and it was more important not to risk injury in that setting to the heir apparent Phillip Rivers.
But via the miracle that happens every once in a while, Brees didn’t just rehabilitate, he came back better. In repairing his shoulder and rehabbing, it is unquestionable that Drew Brees can throw the ball 20 yards further than he ever could, and with 50% better strength, and all that alongside a character that just seems superhuman to the naked eye. Character that would have gone a long way in the Chargers locker room 3 weeks ago.
I think I’ll trot that no. 9 jersey out this offseason for a 6 month victory lap. It will help lessen the sting of a huge missed opportunity for the Chargers knowing when we get there, Brees will have been part of that story too.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
