Joe Scarborough – A Look Back At His Previous Statements About War!
As I was listening to Joe Scarborough go on and on about the Afghanistan war yesterday morning it made me think back. He likes to give raw meat to the left to chew on by repeating over and over that “Obama has tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan” and “President Obama owns this war now, it’s not Bush’s anymore”….I’m paraphrasing to some extent. It made me think back to things Joe has said in the past. I was curious so I went to the google thingy and did a search. I found these quotes from Mr. Scarborough back in 2003 when the Iraq War started. Below is Joe’s Mission Accomplished moment…
“I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)
“I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types…. I just wonder, who’s going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: ‘Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong’? Maybe the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war….
“Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr. Ritter actually told a French radio network that — quote, ‘The United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs, defeated.’ Sorry, Scott. I think you’ve been chasing the wrong tail, again.
“Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don’t call them ‘elitists’ for nothing.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 4/10/03)
“Sean Penn is at it again. The Hollywood star takes out a full-page ad out in the New York Times bashing George Bush. Apparently he still hasn’t figured out we won the war.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 5/30/03)
Isn’t that funny? We won the Iraq War in 2003 and I MISSED IT! So someone tell me why I should be listening to Joe Scarborough blather on, pretending like he’s a dove. So I looked a little further and found this from Mr. Scarborough in February of 2007…
Even if you agree with me that this war was worth fighting as long as we believed Saddam Hussein had WMD’s aimed at America, at some point you have to face the facts: the Bush administration was wrong about those weapons, wrong about the nuclear program, wrong about their refusal to quell rioting early, wrong about Bremer’s gutting of the Iraqi army and police force, wrong about refusing to kill or capture al Sadr in 2003, wrong to tell the generals not speak of the coming insurgency, wrong to stubbornly refuse to give generals the troops they needed to win this war, wrong to make the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, wrong for the VP to claim that the insurgency was in its death throes and wrong to push a surge plan that the president’s top generals opposed.
Joe Scarborough will say whatever the hell he wants as long as it suits his current situation. His photo should appear next to the definition of hypocrite in the dictionary. He seems to get away with it most of the time, though.
Macho Bumper Stickers
I saw a bumper sticker on the way into work today that is a perfect example of the macho idiots who populate our society. It said…
“Insured By Glock”
What does that actually mean anyway. If he gets in an accident, he’s going to shoot someone? Who, the other driver, the cop who shows up, the judge, or is it the body shop that is going to fix the car? It makes absolutely no sense and is really just meant to intimidate people, I guess. Tell them, I’m packing and I have small testicles.
“Gun Control Means Using Both Hands”
I guess until one of their family members gets killed by a psycho on a rampage, we’ll have to pry their guns from their cold dead hands.
photo of the day
Lite blogging lately, too much fun to be had and too much work to be done. I’m working on a post but life keeps interrupting…going out to ride around on my lawnmower. I shot this photo a couple of weeks ago on my way home from work. I shot a panoramic the same night but I have a lot of power lines to remove in Photoshop, even the new “content aware fill” can’t handle it.
Shot by Extreme Liberal
Friday Night Jam Session
Sorry about the ad that plays…it’s only 15 seconds. One of my favorite Dave Matthews tunes.
In Defense of Joe Barton – Believe It or Not!
Now obviously what Joe Barton said when he apologized to BP was idiotic, offensive and probably a bad idea politically (we’ll see about that). But for people to say he should resign from his committee post is just another attempt to rule by polls, popularity and giving the media way too much power in our political system. Isn’t that what elections are for? Joe Barton was doing something most Republicans have trouble with, he was being honest. I give him credit for telling us how he really feels and I wish more Republicans and Democrats would do the same thing.
As a Democrat I want him to stay right where he is and keep telling us how he really feels. Let’s make him the new leader of the Republican Party. Sarah, Glenn, Rush and Michelle Bachman need to move over and let Joe step into the spotlight. He’ll probably have more money than any other politician, he kind of has a lock on the oil money now, doesn’t he? So really, elections happen every two years and for a good reason, if you don’t like your representative, you vote them out. Running people out of town for making stupid statements isn’t the way it works in Washington, if it did, the place would be a ghost town.
photo of the day – the cutest granddaughter ever
She was sleeping….she smiles and laughs while she sleeps, gotta love that.
Shot by Extreme Liberal
Quote of the Day
karoli over at Crooks and Liars had this great quote on the end of this post…
There was a time in this country where people as paranoid and self-focused as Glenn Beck were placed in a room with padding and round corners until the meds took hold.
Now they go on national television. Rupert Murdoch’s epitaph should read “He mainstreamed crazy.”
Jack Welch and Joe Scarborough Defend BP!
The craziness coming out of the mouths of some people seems to have no limit. Jack Welch, former Chairman and CEO of GE was on Morning Joke this morning and when asked whether BP should be trusted he basically said yes the can, they are just inept. The really crazy thing that came out of his mouth, and I guess we should cut him some slack because he is getting pretty old, but he said the president should have gotten all the oil CEO’s in a room and locked them in it until they came up with a plan. He was very serious about not letting them leave, forcing them to stay in a room in the White House until they came up with a plan. That is a perfect example of the absolute craziness coming out of some people’s mouths. Let’s break this down, he thinks the president can force private individuals to come to a meeting and then lock them in a room, forcibly, and keep them locked up until they solve an unsolvable problem. Does that sound like we are living in America to you? Is that really what he wants the president to do? Or is it just the right wing hyperbole that appeals to the knuckle-draggers in the country. It President Obama were to have done that, just imagine what the idiots like Joe Scarborough would have screamed.
After Jack Welch made these crazy claims, Joe Scarborough, who loves to talk out of all 4 sides of his mouth, jumps on it and sees an opportunity to use it to his advantage. They had a good ole’ time speculating about this crazy idea and Mika attempted to throw some reality into the situation and of course was talked over and diminished. She also went after Rudy Giuliani for telling a whole bunch of lies last week when he was on several TV shows. This was of course brushed off as White House talking points, whether it was true or not didn’t seem to matter, they are talking points. Which brings me to this whole “golfing while president” talking point the Republicans are trotting out, including the Republican commentors on this site who keep claiming to not be Republicans but when the latest talking point comes off the press, they are right there spewing it.
I have to give Jack Welch credit for shooting down that talking point and saying that president’s need to have recreation and downtime, it makes them think more clearly and do their job better. It’s just one more example of how the right and the media seem obsessed with appearances and symbolism. Reality really has no place in most of their thinking, as was shown when Mika pointed out all the real things that the Obama administration did early on in the crisis and that was then dismissed because they didn’t “convey” that well enough. In their pea-sized brains apparently if you don’t convey it, it didn’t really happen. That’s the type of mentality of too many of the talking heads on TV, reality doesn’t really matter, it’s perceptions that matter. I’m sure there is plenty of room to criticize little details that were or weren’t done, but when people make the blanket, exaggerated claims like he didn’t consult with industry experts…..that’s complete horseshit, they assembled a team of people in Houston composed of experts from many oil companies, engineers, physicists etc.
I have to give Mika credit this morning, she did an excellent job pushing back against the bullshit spewing from Joe and his cronies mouths. Mark Halperin was also a voice of reason, although he never goes too far out on a limb for the president.
Never Enough For The Haters!
The Aweseome Bob Cesca found this comment on Balloon Juice that I have to share with you. It sums up a lot of my feelings towards those on the left who seem to want to cut off their noses to spite their face. I have to wonder if they really long for the days of Bush when they could make a cottage industry out of bitching and whining. Bush certainly gave them a lot to bitch about and folks like Jane Hamsher an Cenk Uygur have made a career out of bitching. Without a big target like Bush, they are turning their guns on the current administration and undermining the principles they claim to be fighting for. From Bob’s post from a commenter on Balloon Juice…
I think the frustration that supporters of the president have (at least it is for me) is that his critics give him credit for nothing. NOTHING.He gets a health care reform bill passed that is sweeping in scope and more than anyone has done in decades. And the left-wing critics say “Not enough.”
He gets a stimulus bill passed that pretty much kept a massive recession from getting worse and all the left-wing critics said was “Not enough.”
He’s on the verge of getting DADT repealed through law as opposed to using a reversible executive order and all the left-wing critics say is “Not enough.”
He gives a speech that talks about peak oil, points out how government corruption played a role and begins to lay out the way forward towards an alternative energy future and all the left-wing critics say is “Not enough” while having orgasms to Rachael Maddow’s satisfying-but-completely unrealistic “Fake President” speech.
Never mind Lily Leadbetter, killing the F-22 (something BUSH couldn’t do), expanding SCHIP, credit card reform, tobacco regulation…but no, it’s not enough. It’s NEVER enough with some people.
There is legit criticism to be made when it comes to President Obama, especially in the civil rights arena. But to hear the WATBs on the left tell it, he hasn’t done a damn thing. And that is simply not true.
Bob sums up the craziness with this…
And this kind of thing achieves… what? Hipster cred? Probably. But I assure you, taking down this president and his supporters with exclusively critical screeds every day will not elect more liberals. Certainly not more liberal presidents. If a Republican is elected next time around, even the most centrist policies of this administration will be rolled back and destroyed within the first 100 days. Guaranteed.
But at least some of these firebaggers and PUMAs have vented their self-defeating rage.
Lite blogging this weekend, traveling to Chicago for a premiere of my latest documentary. We’re going in style, so it should be fun. I’ll be checking in via iPhone, so don’t make me type my thumb off you trolls out there. :)
Bill Gates Says The Stimulus Worked
Check out this clip of Bill Gates on This Week, at about 6:35 he talks about how the stimulus prevented a collapse of our economy. A little later he says a second stimulus that is targeted would be a good thing.
Bill Gates is very measured in what he says, not a political guy at all and very practical. I never liked the way Microsoft did business while he was running the company, but the man himself is pretty amazing. His philanthropy is changing the world. Kudos to Bill Gates…..I never thought I’d say that 10 years ago.
How About Some Good News On The Oil Spill?
BP has purchased 32 machines from Kevin Costner’s company Ocean Therapy Solutions for separating oil from water in the Gulf. This is great news and I think it gives a sense of hope for the situation that seems insurmountable to most. ABC News has a story about this new technology that could help to save the Gulf of Mexico, here are some chunks of that piece…
Costner has spent the past 15 years and more than $20 million of his own money into developing the oil separator, a powerful centrifuge that he claims can separate oil from water and dump the oil into a holding tank, leaving the water 99 percent clean of crude…
…Costner said BP had ordered 32 of the machines. While he acknowledged that a great deal of damage had already been done in the Gulf, he said the machines could still mitigate much of the problem.
“It’s not too late … That oil’s going to keep coming towards those people. That well has not stopped. So we have to be out at the source, sucking it up … I mean, we have to treat it a little bit like war,” he said. “We mustered logistically everything we had to get the beaches of Normandy. We have to muster everything we can to keep it from hitting our beaches.”
I want to personally thank Kevin Costner for investing in this company and caring about clean water. I’m not necessarily a big fan of his movies, but I love the man for doing this. I have to wonder whether a company that didn’t have Kevin Costner backing them up would have been listened to at all. Those BP characters are something else, they act like Republicans. :) And they probably are too.
Anger is Overrated, I Like My President To Be In Control!
Thank you John Dickerson at Slate.com for giving some much-needed perspective on this crazy meme that the media and their Republican puppet masters have wrought on us cable news junkies. You know, the one that says the Barack Obama isn’t angry enough, not emotional enough. And then the leap they’ve been successfully making to date that it points to a lack of leadership. Personally, I think passing a health care bill, no matter how much it is flawed, showed tremendous leadership. People in the media who have never been elected or governed or led for that matter, seem to think they have a right to paint this president as lacking leadership, as if real leaders come out in front of the cameras and blow a fuse, go ballistic and show some emotion. When the reality is that American presidents have rarely, if ever, showed any real anger in public. John Dickerson at Slate.com weighs in on this…(emphasis mine)
While no one has yet discovered a way to plug the BP oil leak, each day does bring the discovery of yet another fundamental character defect that explains President Obama’s helplessness. He’s not emotional enough. He lacks crisis experience. He is insufficiently creative. With the leak likely to last into the summer, before long it will be blamed on Obama’s bad penmanship or his skinny legs.
The one question we’ll always be able to ask, fortunately, is whether the president is sufficiently angry. In the daily temperature reading that has become the White House press briefing, spokesman Robert Gibbs once again addressed the president’s temper. “Our point is not to feign, through method acting, anger at what environmental and economic damage has been wrought by this disaster. That wasn’t going to fill a hole. That wasn’t going to put money in the bank account of a shrimper that’s not fishing. That’s not going to help a hotel worker or a hotel owner on a beach in Florida.”
Here’s the thing about presidential anger. It’s never seen in public—not just from our first smooth jazz president, but from any president. If presidents show anger in public, they risk looking out of control, which in moments of crisis is the exact opposite of what people want.
This perspective seems to have eluded ANY of the talking heads that appear on my TV. The idea that he isn’t angry enough about the spill started with one of the pinhead media people, a right-winger no doubt. It was then picked up and ran with by many others, usually couched in “some say the president isn’t angry enough” statements. Who these “some” are never makes an appearance. It soon morphs into “The American people don’t think he’s angry enough” and then that gets repeated ad nauseum, drumming that line into the masses heads. After they’ve done that long enough, they take a poll and ask a question like “Do you think the president is angry enough about the oil spill?” The media then pretends like they weren’t the ones pushing that meme, it’s the America people that believe this.
Now I bet if you did a poll, completely separate from any questions about the oil spill and asked people, “would you rather your president was calm and in control or angry and pounding his fist on the table?” What do you suppose would be the result? Of course it would be calm and in control. But of course if you couch that question between two questions about oil gushing from a pipe in the gulf, you will get vastly different results. I love the fact that my president doesn’t lose control and let his emotions get the better of him, that IS EXACTLY WHAT I DO NOT WANT HIM TO DO! We all know that if President Obama had come out from day one and yelled and screamed, taken control of BP, put all the responsibility on the federal government….well you know what the right-wing noise machine would have done with that. In the political environment we live in, there is no winning, there is no agreed upon reality, there is no truth – only differing points of view and it doesn’t really matter what the president does or doesn’t do, the right-wing and the firebaggers will find fault with it. And if they can’t find anything factual, they’ll just make shit up like he isn’t angry enough. To me that says they can’t find anything else to criticize him about.
Stay cool, President Obama, don’t believe the right-wing, they are trying to trap you into being the “angry black man.”
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