MSNBC’s Morning Joe brought its infamous racial huckster/weekend host Al Sharpton to the set on Wednesday to discuss a piece the “Rev” wrote for The Huffington Post pleading for Democrats to unify for the general election to preserve the great legacy of Obama....as if differentiating MSNBC from a DNC breakfast wasn’t hard enough.
Willie Geist pressed Sharpton about a comment he made to The New York Times that Hillary Clinton is going into a "street fight with a guy with a razor and a broken Coca-Cola bottle." He said "Rev, you had such an interesting line we were just talking about." The Times wrote:
At the same time, Mrs. Clinton’s attempts at poking Mr. Trump have felt tame compared with what he has unleashed. The day after he accused her husband of rape on Fox News this month, she told CNN, “I have concluded he is not qualified to be president.”
Her aides were exuberant that Mrs. Clinton, a cautious candidate who for weeks had demurred when asked if Mr. Trump was up to the job, had finally publicly declared him unfit. But to many Clinton allies, it felt like a tepid tactic from yesteryear.
“Sometimes, you get the feeling that they’re in a professional boxing match and he’s in a street fight, and they’re coming in with their gloves on,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, expressing dismay over the Clinton operation’s apparent lack of appetite for combat. "This is a street fight with a guy with a razor and a broken Coca-Cola bottle,” he added, “and you’ve got to fight him like that.”
Sharpton knows something about a street fight – having spurred several racial riots and fatal events around “white interlopers.” But that didn’t come up.
"You can't come in with gloves waiting on the referee to fight Donald Trump. You've got to fight the kind of fight he's fighting. He showed that yesterday," Sharpton said in reference to Trump's testy news conference about his belated donations to veterans groups.
What does it mean for Hillary? "It means that she's either got to toughen up or have tougher surrogates that can resonate with her base. Otherwise she looks like she's out of touch only because you're in a ring and the fight's out in the alley."
Sharpton added "“See, I’ve always argued, and I’ve known and dealt with New York press all my life Trump is a bully. You deal with a bully by calling a bully's shot. You don't try to explain. You're in the schoolyard in New York - Trump and I both grew up in New York - you're in a schoolyard in New York and a bully talks about your family. You don't come back and explain to him, well, let me tell you what parenting class -- you come back and call his bluff."
PS: Sharpton had to be breaking into a sweat in his last moments on the set, as Scarborough next turned to Steven Rattner as he complained about how the IRS isn’t doing enough audits: "They cut their budget by 17.6 percent, so there are 23 percent fewer enforcement staff....the number of audits has gone down by 22 percent. For those people who think that the tax system is rigged, the fewer the audits, the more likely there is tax avoidance, the more likely there is tax evasion. And so you need a robust IRS."
That's a tough passage before Sharpton the tax evader before co-host Mika Brzezinski said "Reverend Al Sharpton, thank you very much" for coming in. He couldn't wait for the commercial.
