STARTING TOMORROW: Promiscuities!

MONDAY, MAY 1, 2023

He was screaming and yelling, Joe said: It was Friday morning, April 28—the start of the end of the week.

Morning Joe went on the air at 6 A.M. sharp. As of 6:02, the eponymous host of the "cable news" program was emphatically saying this:

SCARBOROUGH (4/28/23): So, so again, I'm just a simple country lawyer, but I would think that an attorney, in New York City, would not be screaming at a woman who is saying his client raped her.

And, and time and time again, as E. Jean Carroll was telling the jury this, this just horrific story about how she was raped, Joe Tacopina was, was berating her, yelling at her. The judge repeatedly had to call him off. 

"It's not good," Scarborough said. So the morning began. 

(To watch the pseudo-discussion which followed, you can just click here. To peruse the discussion on a minute-by-minute basis, click here for the Internet Archive. For reasons which may be perfectly obvious, this channel presents no transcripts.)

So the morning began. As the poet once observed, "it was a normal day." 

As the broadcast started, Morning Joe's two co-hosts were present. They were joined by two sidekicks and by four additional guests. 

It was a morning like any morning! The seven who made it a Gang of 8 politely sat around as the male co-host delivered his harangues. They politely awaited their chance to say they agreed with his statements.

After a brief and very unusual start, Scarborough painted that portrait of events the previous day at the Donald J. Trump rape / defamation trial. At that point, Willie "The Echo" Geist jumped in, agreeing with what Joe said.

"By most accounts, it was pretty ugly in that courtroom yesterday," the dependable sidekick eventually said. Displaying one of his many skills, Geist had supported the general picture without repeating Scarborough's apparently inaccurate statements.

According to Geist, it had been "pretty ugly in that courtroom" the previous day! None of the participants ever mentioned an obvious fact:

None of the Gang of 8 had been present in the courtroom the previous day. No cameras had been there either.

That said, this was a typical "cable news" TV show. At 6:04, Scarborough turned to an NBC News legal analyst and returned to his basic portrait:

SCARBOROUGH: Danny, you're neither a country lawyer nor are you mediocre like me. So perhaps you can just verify for our friends at home, it's not good to yell at somebody who could have been a rape victim on the stand.

Scarborough was speaking to Danny Cevallos, one of the least political—and most capable—legal analysts available on this "cable news" channel. 

Cevallos is a defense attorney himself. He explained how difficult it is for a defense attorney to cross examine a woman who is alleging that she has been raped by the lawyer's client. 

That said, Cevallos didn't repeat the claim that Tacopina had been screaming and yelling at Carroll, or that he'd been "berating her. That said, so what? 

After Cevallos was done, Scarborough went there again:

SCARBOROUGH: Right now, think about it. We talk about all these other cases that are going on right now. This may be a civil case, but this is a case involving Donald Trump raping somebody. Raping somebody.

We talk about payoffs to porn stars? This is a case where he has been accused by E. Jean Carroll of rape. He's not even showing up. His lawyer is screaming at the possible rape victim, and it's not going well.

"It's not going well," Geist instantly echoed. 

(In this case, Scarborough's statement had been vague enough so that Geist was able to repeat it word for word.)

Before he was done with the eight-minute discussion, Scarborough would draw Al Sharpton into the scrum. Like Scarborough and Geist, Sharpton hadn't been present in the courtroom the previous day—but he too agreed to play along with what the host had repeatedly said.

In fact, the host had now said it three separate times! During Thursday's cross examination, Joe Tacopina had been screaming and yelling at E. Jean Carroll. "Time and time again," he had yelled at her and berated her!

It was a dumb thing to do, Joe Scarborough said. Sharpton and Geist backed him up.

In real time, we were a bit surprised by what we saw Scarborough say. Our reason?

We had already read this front-page report in the New York Times about the previous day's courtroom events. 

There was no mention of any screaming or yelling in the Times report.  Even worse, "Ms. Carroll’s interactions with Mr. Tacopina were curt but civil," the Times report had said.

We'd also seen Lisa Rubin on Thursday's Deadline: White House. Rubin, an MSNBC legal analyst, had been present in the courtroom that day. On Thursday evening, her report to Chris Hayes on All In had started like this:

HAYES (4/27/23): How does the cross examination start off?

RUBIN: The cross examination started off this morning, Chris. It was such a long day that I'm almost at a loss to remember exactly how he started off with her. But what I will say is that he was a lot gentler than I thought he would be.

Rubin's account continued from there. That said, she had actually been in the courtroom—and, as with other such observers, she made no mention of the screaming and yelling with which Scarborough opened his show.

In real time on Friday morning, we were surprised, but not surprised, by what Scarborough said. As it turned out, the multimillionaire corporate star was apparently making it up.

He was feeding us blue tribe viewers the kind of novelized story we love to hear. He fed us a very familiar picture, drawn from preferred Storyline.

Scarborough's presentation this day was one of the type of "promiscuities" we plan to discuss this week. As a minor point of fairness, let us say this about that:

Except for Tacopina's possible need for additional security, nothing will turn on the unsupported, pleasing claims with which Scarborough opened Friday's broadcast. 

(This morning, as Scarborough discussed those same events, his claims about the screaming and yelling were gone. "Maybe he's been threatened with a defamation suit of his own," one ardent young analyst cried.)

Was Joe Tacopina screaming and yelling at E. Jean Carroll last Thursday? Among the promiscuities routinely served on cable news, it's pretty much as you like it. Feel free to embellish to taste!

Under current arrangements, cable hosts will be supported by sidekicks and guests no matter what they've said. If there were such a thing as terrible people, these corporate stooges would belong to that race—but our tribe continues to flock to their shows to be served with the bullroar we like.

Tucker Carlson is finally gone from this vastly dumbnified subculture. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, Joe and Mika remain. 

Willie "The Echo" continues to serve, as he did last Friday. Tomorrow, we'll show you the brand of (apparently) dishonest script Nicolle Wallace served our grateful tribe ten hours later that day.

Tomorrow: Rubin and Jacobs were at the trial. This is what they said.

That very unusual start: We said that Scarborough's presentation followed "a very unusual start" to last Friday's program.

We refer to the way he began the show by flashing an exciting photo of a 20-year-old college student in a rather skimpy bikini, to everyone's amusement (except for Mika). You can see him trigger some "locker room talk" through the Internet Archive site.

For ourselves, we'll only say this: Here, as everywhere else in the past thirty years, the feminism comes and it goes.