A few years ago, MSNBC was fun to watch purely for its comedy. The lowest-rated cable news network was like the Bizarro World in DC’s “Superman” comic books when I was growing up: amusing but bizarre.
(For the uninitiated, the character Bizarro was created in the comics after Superman was exposed to a “duplicate ray” which went awry…creating an anti-Superman with chiseled features who did everything the opposite of how the Man of Steel would act. In Bizarro’s twisted speech, if he uttered, “I am going to kill you,” it meant, “I am going to save you.” You get the idea. Oh, and he lived on a cubical planet he called Htrae.)
But in the aftermath of the hammer attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband, Paul, last Friday, MSNBC has gone all Howler Monkey on us and it isn’t as easy to laugh at them these days. Because with the likes of Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Nicolle Wallace—a onetime functionary in the George W. Bush White House and a former co-host on the daytime television nut fest known as The View—spewing nonstop Democratic Party talking points, MSNBC has become a much clearer danger to America than when I suggested in this space one year ago that it was time to “pull-the-plug” on this biased and pathetic outlet.
The entire broadcast day would be more easily understood if Louise Fletcher —essaying her most famous role as Nurse Ratched from “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”—would occasionally wander onto the set of its various shows and administer Prozac to hosts and guests.
Consider Wednesday’s “Morning Joe” program as Exhibit A.
Referring to a new Pew Research poll that reveals black voters are most concerned about the issue of violent crime, MSNBC regular and notorious race-baiter the Reverend Al Sharpton opined: “The reality is women and men are getting ready for work right now today that are afraid to go to the subway station. They’re afraid to walk (on the street), and that’s not exaggerating.” He then course-corrected to add that “Oklahoma has a higher crime rate than New York,”…something my in-laws in Tulsa might dispute.
Wednesday’s “Morning Joe” rogues gallery included Scarborough’s wife, Mika crying crocodile tears and asking why Republicans “can’t just react the way Speaker Pelosi herself spoke our after Steve Scalise was shot,”…conveniently omitting the words of Pelosi’s daughter Christine. The latter Tweeted in March 2020 that “Rand Paul’s neighbor was right” to beat up the Kentucky U.S. Senator while he was mowing his lawn, sending Senator Paul to the hospital.
Things quickly careened out of control as “Morning Joe” Scarborough himself pivoted to a rabid, anti-Donald J. Trump rant that might have made Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels consider a plagiarism lawsuit… unleashing one unhinged kook after another, each with the same mission: to smear the GOP and somehow tie the arrested assailant David DePape—an illegal immigrant—to conservative “rhetoric.”
Speaking of immigrants, the vile Katty Kay of the BBC chimed in: “I wonder if the level of misinformation which spreads like a virus when you unleash these populist movements has gone beyond the ability of even Donald Trump to control.” (In the onscreen lower-third were the giant block letters “GOP EXTREMISM & THREATS OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE.”) I always enjoy haughty, self-righteous Brits looking down their noses at the USA…when (a) their own country would be flying the Swastika flag if Americans hadn’t saved their butts during World War II and (b) before lecturing us about politics, Katty, consider that back home you’ve had three Prime Ministers is less time than it takes to stir up an average sized batch of Marshmallow Rice Krispie treats.
Scarborough then personally attacked “televangelists that are in it for the money and not for God…whether it is to get folks to send Social Security checks to their ministry or to take to the streets to commit acts of violence.” What???
I had to privilege this week to spend portions of two days at the Biblical Worldview Institute at Prestonwood Baptist Church in suburban Dallas. Speakers included Dr. Craig Evans—one of the greatest living Biblical scholars—as well as Dr. Sean McDowell, author Alisa Childers, and Allen Parr, among others. Oddly…none of the above theologians exhorted participants to “take to the streets to commit acts of violence,” despite the deranged messages on MSNBC Wednesday morning.
The bottom-feeding network then showed—for them—a horrifying video of President Trump at a 2020 press conference stating, “I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.” You can imagine how every one of the Morning Joe set must have wet their pants at that incendiary rhetoric.
The smear-fest wrapped up with presidential “historian” Michael Beschloss offering his view that “a large number of Republican leaders have lied about the 2020 election, saying it was stolen from Donald Trump….so in this atmosphere, it is almost inevitable that on social media you would see lies about what happened to Paul Pelosi.” Beschloss—who should more accurately be billed as a mythicist rather than a historian—offered the helpful addition that “this week is exactly 100 years from when Mussolini came to power in Italy.” He added that’s how “authoritarian” figures like Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump come to power…pretending there’s a crime in the streets.
With apologies to The Amazing Kreskin, I’m going to predict right now that if MSNBC’s unhinged, nutty rhetoric 24/7 is allowed to continue unchecked…David DePape won’t be the only unbalanced person wielding a hammer in the exciting days ahead. Hopefully, once the Red Tsunami sweeps across the United States next Tuesday…the new Congressional leadership will seriously consider muzzling the clear and present danger that is MSNBC.