Joe Scarborough has a warning for conservatives: going after Jeb Bush will make him more likely to run for president.

According to Scarborough, speaking on today's Morning Joe, Jeb is "his mother's son," "kind of "cranky" and "rough around the edges." If conservatives think they will drive Jeb out of the race by attacking him, "they've got him played exactly backwards." To the contrary, conservative attacks will make Jeb more likely to run "to prove them wrong."

In preparation for Democrats possibly losing control of the Senate in the midterm election, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd and his panel actually tried to preemptively spin such a defeat as a good thing for the Democratic Party. On Sunday, Todd proclaimed: "What everybody in Washington knows but won't say, and that is, secretly...I'm convinced, I think we know this, Hillary Clinton would love to see the Senate in Republican hands going into 2016, wouldn't she?" [Listen to the audio]

Politico's Jim VandeHei agreed: "I think a lot of Democrats would. They never say it in public. Because everybody knows virtually nothing is going to happen over the next two years, and Democrats, Hillary Clinton in particular, would love Republicans, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, to actually have to take ownership of some of the dysfunction."

When President Bush gave his fifth State of the Union address on January 31, 2006, he sat at 43 percent approval in the Gallup tracking poll, in no small part because of public perception regarding his administration's handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. When President Obama delivered his fifth State of the Union last night, his Gallup approval number was lower a mere 41 percent, doubtless impacted in no small part by the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare and the public's disapproval of the health care overhaul.  What's more, some 53 percent in a recent Quinnipiac poll slammed the administration as incompetent and 47 percent expressed the belief that President Obama doesn't pay attention to what's transpiring on his watch. As to more objective metrics, the job situation is worse at this point in Barack Obama's presidency than it was the same point in George W. Bush's with higher unemployment (6.7 percent to Bush's 4.9 percent) and a woefully low labor force participation rate (62.8 percent to Bush's 66 percent).

Yet when you compare the Washington Post's front-page treatments of Mr. Obama's January 28 speech and Mr. Bush's January 31, 2006 one, it becomes all too apparent that the Post is eager to help the former spin his way to resetting the narrative for the midterm election year while the paper was all too happy to pound out a drumbeat about how President Bush was an abject failure, a lame duck roasting in the waters of public disapproval. Here's how Post staffers David Nakamura and David Fahrenthold opened up their January 29 front-pager "Obama: I won't stand still" (emphasis mine):

Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson tied immigration reform to the shooting of Trayvon Martin on Wednesday’s Morning Joe, claiming Republican voters oppose the Senate immigration bill because they believe “immigrants are, you know, people in hoodies.” While the inflammatory line would no doubt be well-received on a liberal network like MSNBC, it seems somewhat unbecoming of a professional political journalist.

Suffice it to say, Carlson was not called out by her fellow panelists for the hyperbolic comment. Carlson also commended Thomas Friedman’s latest op-ed in The New York Times, entitled “If Churchill Could See Us Now,” in which Friedman – who recently held up China as a paragon of greatness, so long as they don’t emulate the “American Dream” – blasted House Republicans for making this country “un-great”:

When Politico isn’t busy sending editors to an off-the-record chat with a potentially perjurious U.S. Attorney General, it spends its time mocking a retiring conservative legislator.

A panel of reporters from the Washington tabloid ganged up on Michele Bachmann on Thursday’s Morning Joe, blasting the Minnesota congresswoman as a “celebrity politician” who will become “irrelevant to politics the moment she steps out of public office.”