BREAKING: Facts are stubborn things no more!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, 2018

Joe and Gene mangle the government shutdown:
It was once widely said that facts were stubborn things.

Those days are widely gone. Consider Joe Scarborough's puzzling performance on today's Morning Joe.

Speaking with Noah Rothman, Scarborough had already given the false impression that Democrats achieved the extension of CHIP funding as a result of the weekend's three-day shutdown.

Rothman seemed a bit confused by what Joe had said. In reply to an oration by Rothman, Joe offered this thoroughly puzzling statement:
SCARBOROUGH (1/23/18): You say [Democrats] lost something. They got CHIP funding, right?

If I'm a Demorat, and of course I’m not—but God knows I’m sounding more like one every morning—if I’m a Democrat, and I went back to my town hall meeting and they said, ‘You backed down,’ I would say, 'I did what? I did what? I guaranteed, by standing up to Donald Trump and making sure he was out of this process, I guaranteed CHIP funding. I guaranteed, by my fighting—you’re telling me that a three-day shutdown wasn’t worth guaranteeing health care for millions and millions of the truly disadvantaged children?'

That’s a win for Democrats if they know how to spin it the right way.
To watch this conversation, click here, move ahead to the 7-minute mark.

Joe seemed badly confused. In fact, the CHIP extension had been agreed to before the shutdown began. When Democrats voted for the shutdown last Friday, they were voting against the same six-year CHIP extension which got approved three days later.

It was DACA they were fighting for. They already had agreement on CHIP.

By now, it seemed that Joe didn't know what happened. Soon, he repeated himself, speaking to Gene Robinson:
SCARBOROUGH: Gene Robinson, if Democrats are smart enough to know how to fight, and right now that is a question we don't have an answer to, but if they're smart enough to fight, they will go home and say, "Damn right I shut down the government for three days. And in those three days Republicans caved, and now we have health care for little children who didn't have health care before our government shutdown. We win, they lose."
Poor Gene! His host's statement completely jumbled what had actually happened. How does a "cable news" guest handle something like that?

Luckily, Robinson knew exactly what to do! He plowed ahead, pretending that Scarborough's statement was perfectly accurate!

Cover the children's eyes and ears. You don't want them to know about this yet:
ROBINSON (continuing directly): Exactly. The six years of CHIP funding is the one really big concrete thing Democrats got out of this. And frankly, with all respect, to say they lost the narrative while gaining the essential thing they were fighting for is kind of ridiculous...
As you can see if you watch the tape, Robinson went on from there, making matters even worse. But you get the basic idea.

So it goes among this misfiring upper-end caste. Last Wednesday night, Our Own Rhodes Scholar opened her show by telling viewers that Republicans could pass their proposed finding measure with their own Senate votes. She announced that they didn't need a single Democratic vote!

That statement was crazily wrong. This morning, Scarborough and Robinson told their viewers that Democrats were fighting for CHIP funding last Friday, and that they succeeding when the GOP folded over the weekend.

Who or what are these life forms? From where have these apparent life forms come? What explains their way of life? What explains their puzzling presence among us?

10 comments:

  1. Question, Bob: Why was CHIP funding put into the House bill in the first place? And the correct answer isn't that the Republicans just care about poor kids...

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    1. That's not the issue. The issue is whether Scarborough and Robinson were accurate when they said that the Democrats had gotten something in return for the shutdown.

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    2. Nope. That's not the right answer either. The threat of a shutdown caused the House Republicans to insert that CHIP funding. They hoped to force the Dems hand. Who knows if CHIP would've been there otherwise? The shutdown happened, which shows a willingness to stand up to principle. Plus, unless McConnell is lying, a separate DACA bill will be put forward.

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  2. Eh, what? Good luck getting votes for an NHS from ANY Republican, including Trump. (Although he seemed to propose that on the campaign trail, he's too much of a coward to fight for it). CHIP is the best we can do for those "poor children" that you care so much about. And it does improve and save lives.

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  3. It definitely doesn't improve anything. It does two things: exciting lib-zombies and keeping the atrocious mafia system from collapsing.

    And if did collapse, it'd have to be replaced by something better, because worse isn't possible.

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  4. Scarborough and Robinson have little to no influence on liberal politics, at least none that I can ascertain. They react, they comment, but don't lead any movements. Hell, Scarborough isn't even a Democrat. They certainly don't have the kind of influence that Fox has over the Republican Party, or that Fox & Friends has over their puppet president.
    Focusing on the shiny objects of "mistakes I saw on the Morning Joe program" seems a bit wayward in these unusual times.
    Besides, the comment above shows how the Republican fear of a shutdown probably caused them to insert CHIP funding. So, now that Democrats have shown a willingness to take this extreme measure, perhaps the R's will continue to "sweeten the deal" to get their precious 60 votes.

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  5. Sorry Mao. President "Establishment" and his henchmen in the GOP can't hear your crying for the citizens.
    Tough break. Maybe you can convince the Kremlin to get on the right side of humanity.

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  6. But this is not a matter of mere opinion. It is a matter of fact. The meeting occurred

    click on here

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