Things got chippy on Morning Joe today after Amy Holmes of The Blaze pointed out that President Obama has personalized and publicized his conflict with Benjamin Netanyahu in a way he hasn't done even with despots like Kim Jong Un or the Castro brothers.
When Holmes added that "only Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be the focal point of this president's ire," former Obama spokesman Gibbs called Holmes' statement "the silliest thing I've probably heard in a long time."
In an interview with former Obama White House press secretary and current NBC political analyst Robert Gibbs on Tuesday's Today, co-host Matt Lauer saw big problems for Hillary Clinton in the wake of revelations that she used a private email account during her tenure as secretary of state: "It provides a lay-up, doesn't it Robert, for her critics who say this is all about a lack of transparency as she prepares for a run in 2016, that you can't go back and look at those emails?"
Pot, kettle, hello? If Dems wanted to find someone to attack Chris Christie's credibility for claiming he didn't know what was going on in his administration, couldn't they have found someone less vulnerable than Robert Gibbs? After all, Gibbs served as spox for Barack Obama, the man who has made an art form out of claiming he only found out about his admin's latest scandal when he read about it in the paper.
But there was Gibbs leading with his chin on Morning Joe today, asking "how many times can [Christie] play the card of 'I had no idea this was going on in my own office?" Joe Scarborough was only too happy to oblige Gibbs with a haymaker to his rhetorical jaw: "Robert, it's getting to the point he is starting to sound like Barack Obama." View the amusing video after the jump.
Potemkin Village, anyone? Joe Scarborough has offered a scathing simile for the new-'n-improved Obamacare website. On today's Morning Joe, he likened the site to the set of a Hollywood Western--pushing back the facade reveals that there's nothing behind it.
Even former Obama spox Robert Gibbs—proudly sporting an Auburn jersey—acknowledged that big chunks of the system, including the payment mechanism for subsidies, haven't even been built. So people can go to the site, receive the illusion that they have obtained coverage, only to find that there is no follow-through. View the video after the jump.
After playing a clip of Saturday Night Live mocking President Obama's "embattled second term" on Monday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie sympathetically observed: "I guess if you're at the White House you laugh so you don't cry." She then turned to Obama's former press secretary Robert Gibbs and wondered: "What do you think the President's state of mind is right now? I mean, have you ever seen him like this, saying – acknowledging, 'I have a credibility problem'?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Gibbs responded by trying to insulate the President from any responsibility for the disastrous ObamaCare rollout: "I think he is obviously tremendously frustrated that no one told him the extent of this problem. I think that you, as the commander-in-chief and as the President of the United States, have to trust all of those around you to implement and I think there's no doubt a deficit of trust that's lead to that deficit of credibility."
In today's "This Can't Possibly Be True - But It IS" segment, some genius at MSNBC during Friday's Morning Joe actually put a chyron on the bottom of the screen that read "GOP Flubs ObamaCare Launch."
Better still, at times the chyron was underneath former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs:
You know things are going badly when you’re a Democratic President whose former press secretary turned MSNBC contributor is on national television bashing the rollout of your signature piece of legislation.
On Monday, Robert Gibbs, appearing on MSNBC’s Now, said of the ObamaCare website, “I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure that this thing was supposed to work” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
British historian Niall Ferguson brought a breath of fresh air to the set of MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday, effortlessly cutting through the show’s typical left-wing spin.
Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were engaged in their new favorite pastime – slamming Ted Cruz and other GOP “extremists” – when Ferguson jumped in and suggested that President Obama may also be culpable in the current budget impasse: [See video below.]
Well, there was a Blue Moon just last month, so maybe the time was right for some rare criticism of President Obama by Andrea Mitchell.
Mitchell didn't hold back on today's Morning Joe, accusing the President of "bungling," being "ambivalent," and of undercutting his Secretary of State and Vice-President. For good measure, Mitchell suggested that in his heart of hearts, fellow panelist and former Obama spox Robert Gibbs agreed with her acidulous assessment. View the video after the jump.
On August 8, I speculated that the Clintons might have been responsible for three different NBC employees within a few hours of each other speaking out against the network's planned miniseries about Hillary.
On Wednesday, the Hollywood Reporter cited unnamed sources at NBC News claiming that fear of the Clintons might be playing a role in that network's apparent cold-feet regarding the project:
While MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell admitted that the planned NBC biopic of Hillary Clinton was a "bad idea," on her Thursday 1 p.m. ET hour show she and her guests scolded Republicans for refusing to allow the biased network to moderate GOP primary debates: "That's where you get debates where the audience is cheering because they were all hand picked by local or state parties, that's where you get candidates like Mitt Romney talking about self-deportation to try to play to the crowd." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Mitchell made that observation while discussing the topic with former Obama White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, not exactly someone with the best interests of the GOP at heart. Gibbs ranted: "If you're only going to do debates in front of diehard Republicans that 100% agree with you, you're going to end up pushing yourself farther and farther and farther to the right....you're not going to win any national elections."