Supplemental: Mika [HEART] her darling Trump!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2015

One of her strangest outings:
We’ve had this reaction before as we’ve watched the first half hour of Morning Joe:

If you didn’t assume it couldn’t be true, you’d really think that Mika and Joe must be on the Trump payroll—that their daily TV program must be some sort of closeted infomercial.

We thought Mika was especially strange today. But that thought has occurred to us in the past, so naked is this program’s pro-Trump, anti-Clinton propaganda.

Consider this ten-minute tape from this morning’s program, in which Mika becomes annoyed with “the likes of” Cokie Roberts and Nicholas Confessore when they make some anodyne comments about videotape of Trump.

At the start of the segment, Trump is shown responding to questions at yesterday’s No Labels meeting in New Hampshire. His answers have virtually nothing to do with actual policy questions.

Confessore and Roberts both note this obvious fact. Roberts says you can’t knock the guy for giving such answers, since it’s working for him.

It soon becomes clear that Mika is annoyed with what has been said. In the following statement, she describes her guests, at several points, as being part of a disdainful “intellectual elite.”

She whines about the fact that they aren’t pro-life, like the straight-shooting Trump.

Mika's statements would be unsurprising if they came from a second-tier Republican spokesperson. The statements are amazing coming from Mika, who is cast on this infomercial-like program as a liberal who wants to see a Democrat win next year.

Some of this language doesn’t quite parse. We’ve recorded what was actually said, starting at the 7:30 mark:
BRZEZINSKI (10/13/15): So I fully appreciate the disdain in Cokie’s voice. And [speaking to Confessore] your, like, looking at that going, “What just happened?”

I do! I fully appreciate where you’re coming from on that.

But I have to say, we watch things in terms, “Oh goodness! OK. How is this going to play in that audience? And how is it going to play across the country? And how is it going to impact the polls? What exactly is he doing?”

I don’t even think he’s thinking about what he is doing. But what he was doing was winning. What he was doing was winning!

I’m telling you, those answers weren’t necessarily— they might have been disdainful among the likes of intellectual elite because they didn’t go into deep policy on equal pay, or deep policy on women. But he was right there with his answers, gave clear—“You know what? Hey! You don’t like me? I don’t really care! You don’t like my opinion? This is what it is! I’m not going to be politically correct!”

And then he gave a very clear answer on the issue of being pro-life—which I know, to most of the intellectual elite, that is horrifying.

BARNICLE: But that’s what separates his candidacy, because he gives his answers without fear.

BRZEZINSKI: He gives his answers— Thank you. Thank you. That’s what I’m trying to say.

BARNICLE: You may not like the answer, it may not be a complete answer, but he does give it without fear.

BRZEZINSKI: Thank you.
Mika’s resentment of the disdainful intellectual elite makes her sound like a second-rate conservative spokesperson. She seemed to vouch for the fact that Candidate Trump won't be politically correct.

We were especially struck by the resentment she voiced about Trump’s statement that he is pro-life, which no one criticized him for.

In the passage shown above, Mike Barnicle jumped in to help. Moments later, so did the reliably unctuous Willie Haskell-Geist Jr. Unctuously, he elicited another odd statement from Mika:
HASKELL-GEIST: There was no policy in that answer to that woman about equal pay, that’s true. But we can’t suddenly be shocked that those are the answers he’s giving. This is how he’s been campaigning—

BRZEZINSKI: But there’s a very interesting argument—and I’ve actually had a conversation with him privately about equal pay for equal work. And there’s a very interesting argument behind that. And if you look at—

Well.
Mika knows the real Donald Trump, the deep Trump, the one seen in private.

Mika and Trump should rent a room. To Morning Joe’s alleged liberal voice, nothing about this candidate doesn’t seem good-to-great.

What makes these comments so strange? Once again, it’s the casting! According to the liner notes, Joe is the loud, overbearing former Republican congressman. Mika is supposed to be a liberal who wants to see a Democrat retain the White House next year.

In theory, they’re providing a left/right exchange on their deeply puzzling program. Watching Mika each day, we can’t help wondering:

Is this whole program a con?

One additional point: This was a gruesome statement by Mika, delivered with an air of passive-aggressive annoyance:

I fully appreciate where you’re coming from on that. But I have to say, we watch things in terms, “Oh goodness! OK. How is this going to play in that audience? And how is it going to play across the country? And how is it going to impact the polls? What exactly is he doing?”

Is it possible that Mika and Joe should stop “watching things” that way? That they should start “watching things” by asking if the candidates' statements actually make any sense?

31 comments:

  1. Cokie Roberts, defender of all things HRC, yet critical of POTUS Obama.

    "The really dangerous thing, I think, for him and for the Democrats in this poll, and that he's going to have to think about as he makes the State of the Union message, is that more people say that the Republicans have the right idea about the size and role of the federal government than the Democrats do."

    NPR’s Cokie Roberts Challenges Obama Claim About Historic Levels of Partisanship in Washington January, 2014

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  2. So Mika states the obvious -- as nonsensical as the Donald might be, he at least gives the air of authenticity rather than beating around the bush, carefully weghing each worrd, afraid of who might be offended.

    And, of course, the obvious that, at least for the moment, he's winning doing that.

    And stating what should be obvious of course makes him, in Bob's World, "her darling Trump."

    "He gives his answers without fear" says Barnicle. I guess that makes him "his darling Trump" as well.

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    2. It's important to defend Mika's performance as 4:25 has here.

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    3. "performance?"

      Mika is genuinely -- fearlessly -- awful.

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  3. This seems to me a very important column. In theory, the campaign is to demonstrate to the public that the candidate would be a good President. But, if our "experts" in the media merely tell us how well the candidate is campaigning, then we never learn whether s/he'd be good at the job of President.

    It would be like Consumer Reports not testing the product, but merely telling its readers how good its advertisements were.

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    1. You know what Geritol is, Dinky? You're its human embodiment IMHO.

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    2. A totally irrelevant comment regarding a reasonably stated opinion. Please get a life and take it elsewhere.

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  4. I don't watch Joe and Mika any longer - not since a few years ago when I realized that Joe is in fact Mika's intellectual superior. That was all it took for me... Now when I wake up early, ( I live in California) I read my book until the paper comes.

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  5. Mika could still be a died in the wool democrat even while broadcasting with a pro-Trump bias if she (incorrectly) believes that Trump as nominee would be easier for the democratic nominee to beat.

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    1. Or to rephrase: I'm maj, a wingnut jackass elite spewing my bile on a pseudo-progressive poliblog because I can, but for no other purpose.

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  6. Yes Bob, the whole show is a con. Mika has never been a liberal. She just plays one on TV.

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  7. Bob complains about Hillary's mistreatment by the media, yet CNN points out:
    According to Andrew Tyndall, who meticulously tracks the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts, the Sanders campaign has received just two minutes of coverage on the shows since Labor Day. Tyndall said "the overwhelming majority of Democratic coverage" has gone to Hillary Clinton — 26 minutes — with another 6 minutes for Joe Biden, who may or may not enter the race.

    OTOH if most of Hillary's coverage is criticism of her e-mails, then she's not so well off, either.

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    1. You know what Geritol is, Dinky? You're its human embodiment IMHO.

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    2. The gatekeeper networks are obviously not reaching or influencing the Democratic primary electorate.

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  8. Bob you're confusing me - I thought you were all about sticking it to self important elites who mock the supposed lack of sophistication of the flyover rubes. You should be on Trump and Mika's side here, not the effete tv intellectuals castigating his, and by extension middle america's, views.

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    1. Or to rephrase: I'm maj, a wingnut jackass elite spewing my bile on a pseudo-progressive poliblog because I can, but for no other purpose.

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    2. The question is why, given the choice, does Bob prefer a Sam-and-Cokie to a Joe-and-Mika? Clearly these are both not-youngish-women who owe their careers to their looks and family connections. And Cokie said horrible things about Al Gore. Jr.

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    3. The question is why, given the choice, do commenters choose to troll with baseless assumptions about what Somerby "prefers" to actually engaging his critiques?

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    4. Bob does not prefer Sam-and-Cokie to Joe-and-Mika. He prefers "news" programs to provide information and not endless talking about how pundits "feel" about the candidates. He calls them as he sees them.

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