Mark Finkelstein
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With the elections only 18 days away, Morning Joe bemoans the Democrats' lack of a message. They warn that Dems could fail to retake the House or the Senate, and that Beto O'Rourke could lose by 10 points.
On Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, commenting on the Jamal Khashoggi news, calls supporters of President Trump "quislings," a term meaning traitors who serve as the puppet of the enemy occupying their country. But the show didn't get to a discussion of the news until after the panel bantered about last night's baseball game—for over four minutes.
On Ari Melber's MSNBC show The Beat Wednesdsay night, MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson imagines President Trump saying about the death of Jamal Khashoggi, "I don't care, it was a brown journalist." Johnson suggests Trump would have reacted differently if Khashoggi were white, American, and worked for "a news outlet that the president was more happy with," presumably a reference to Fox News.
On Morning Joe, reacting badly to President Trump's labeling of Stormy Daniels as "horseface," Mika Brzezinski calls Trump "base, animalistic and disgusting" and wondered "what the Russians could have on him."
Tuesday morning on CNN's New Day, liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin admits that President Trump has "made a connection" with his base, and that "he's made them feel that he's on their side."
On Ari Melber's MSNBC show Monday night, Mara Gay of the NYT editorial board misrepresents President Trump's mocking of Elizabeth Warren's phony claim to be a Native American. Gay says it was "was actually about white anxieties among Donald Trump's base about who's white in America." In fact, Trump was calling out Warren's cheating: using the phony claim of being a Native American to get ahead in academia.
The Asian-American author of a New York Times column claims that ending discrimination against Asian-Americans in college admissions would do them "egregious harm." It's not simply that The New York Times found an Asian-American willing to write a column—in the context of the lawsuit against Harvard— supporting continued discrimination against Asian-Americans in college admissions.
Guest-hosting Joy Reid's MSNBC show, Ali Velshi finds it impossible to understand why President Trump, given his criticism of US journalists, would express concern about the possible murder of a journalist at the hands of the Saudi government.
An absolute classic out of the Dem/MSM playbook. Take a huge, expensive, inefficient, government program. Find someone with a heartwrenching story who is helped by it. Highlight that story as if it represents the essence of the program in question. Bonus points if you can get someone to get choked up on camera. And thus it was that today's Morning Joe featured a segment in which NBC reporter Morgan Radford traveled to Ohio ahead of President Trump's rally there. She found Colleen, a mother whose daughter had developed cancer at age seven, who said that "it was life-changing, what the ACA [Obamacare] did for us."
On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough says that Republicans got a "huge bump" from the Kavanaugh hearings, whereas the hearings were "a disaster for the Democratic party."
On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough explains Nikki Haley's resignation as UN Ambassador by suggesting she is positioning herself for a 2020 presidential run, on the theory that, as Scarborough predicted back in August, President Trump won't seek re-election. Scarborough surmises that Haley wants to get out in front of Mike Pence.
On CNN, host Alisyn Camerota, referring to allegations by Christine Ford and Deborah Ramirez, spoke of "these accusations against Brett Kavanaugh—not one, but certainly two credible ones."
The cast of Morning Joe (Mika, Joe, Meacham, and Barnicle) put on their bitter-beer faces. They castigate Republicans for celebrating the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh with brewskis, and rip Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell for their roles. "A shabby Senate, with a short-sighted, selfish, cynical, Majority Leader who cared more about his political party and his own political ambitions than the country itself," said Joe.
We knew that Senator Susan Collins would come under attack by the left for her "yes" vote on Kavanaugh. But comparing Collins to people who would attend lynchings after going to church? No one would sink that low, right? Wrong. On MSNBC Friday afternoon, Al Sharpton said: "these people would go to church and then go to the lynching after clothing themselves in morality. And that's what we're seeing today. When Susan Collins can stand there after this man [President Trump] mocked Al Franken last night."
CNN international correspondent Farai Sevenzo says of First Lady Melania's Trump visit to a Kenyan game reserve: "she was dressed, really, in the classic Out of Africa by Sydney Pollack way, or even John Huston's, The African Queen: the jodhpurs, the boots. The color was all there. The stylist should be very proud of himself."
On Ari Melber's MSNBC show, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, whom Melber twice described as a "conservative," said of Republican male senators commenting on the Kavanaugh confirmation: "they are so emotional, almost hysterical. I mean, I would make a joke about it, that they're behaving as if it's their time of the month, but this is very, very serious."
On Sam Harris's "Waking Up" podcast, Bill Maher says that when it comes to immigration, "'Steve Bannon and I share some ideas." Harris and Maher also criticize the liberal media's dishonest coverage of Muslim immigration issues.
CNN does its best to undermine the FBI's latest investigation of Brett Kavanaugh. Host John Berman suggests that the investigation is a "sham." Host Alisyn Camerota sheds crocodile tears, wondering whether the impliedly inadequate investigation is "bad for the FBI."
On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough slams the MSM's "one-sided, biased," pro-Christine Ford coverage of the Kavanaugh nomination. He says the MSM will be surprised by how Republican candidates will be improving in the polls, in the same way the mainstream media was incapable of imagining a Trump victory in 2016.
On CNN, co-host Alisyn Camerota says that Christine Ford's accusation that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her and held his hand over her mouth to keep her from crying out "makes more sense" in light of an alleged incident in which Kavanaugh threw ice at someone in a bar.